Favorite links in Vista gone? Is your list empty? Here’s the fix.

Although not all of us are cut to be extreme Windows tweakers, there are still a few small hidden tweaks most people are familiar with and feel comfortable enough changing. Take for example the shortcut arrows in Windows. Those have been around since Win95 I believe, and not even in Windows Vista is there an obvious way to remove them.

In fact, because XP users can rely on the free Tweak UI they can access to this setting without recurring to a third party application. But there are still no PowerToys for Vista, so third parties is what we have for now.

So, I was recently trying a few different Vista “tweakers” to see what they were capable of, and while none offered anything particularly interesting, one of them decided to remove the registry entry for the shortcut arrows completely, rather than changing its value. The result? An empty list of Favorite Links (those useful shortcuts on the Windows Explorer sidebar).

If this has happened to you, don’t worry. Just download a trusted application that will correct it for you, namely Vista Shortcut Manager, a.k.a. FxVisor by Frameworkx. This small application will let you configure the shortcut arrow overlay while also fixing whatever any other program did to your registry entry.