This worked beautifully for 3 weeks until I shut down system wile I was out of town. Came back and Win7 reset it's "system Maintenance trouble shooter" to on again so it deleted shortcuts again !!!!
I'm trying Hugh;s Icon Restore" now.
You don't have it set to use automatically the utility in Windows that "cleans up your desktop" by deleting seldom used shortcuts?
I'm not in WIndows 7 at the moment so I can't look for where it is located but Search should take you to it.
It's actually not a bad utility once I found out that it does not blindly delete things if you tell it to go ahead -- it creates a list of items not used for some period of time and you can select/deselect on that list before actually having it do anything and then it does not delete them but moves them to a folder called Unused Desktop Shortcuts.
So it may be worth looking to see if you have such a folder on the desktop and if so what is inside it.
Let us know how you get on with Icon Restore but it would be nice to know what is causing your situation.
If you do a search in Win 7 for "unused icons" system maintenance pops up with a box already pre-checked for clearing broken links and unused icons automatically. Uncheck it. That should help