Doug, I am still going back to a variant on my original comment. If you copied shortcuts from the external drive to your desktop, and those shortcuts pointed to programs that were located on the external drive, these would continue working from your desktop so long as the external drive is connected to your computer and functional.
You still have the shortcuts, which still point to program locations on an external drive which is no longer extant nor accessible to Windows, which means that these can never work and you will not ever get them to work in this state. To prove this to yourself, first select any shortcut on your desktop that is working, then hit SHIFT+F10 to bring up the Context Menu and select "Properties" from the context menu. Listen to what is stated for the "Target" box, it will almost certainly start with C:\ followed by the full path to the program followed by the program-name.exe file. Now, select one of your dead shortcuts and do the same thing for it. The target box will almost certainly start with E:\. Since you no longer have the E:\ drive connected, or you may have another drive that's been assigned the letter E, but that does not contain the same data as your defunct E drive did, there is no way for Windows to reach the target location. If you have the programs you're looking to make usable again on your Windows 7 machine you will need copies of them from somewhere. (If you don't have a copy then you're pretty well stuck.) I would create a folder on your C:\ drive, e.g., OldPrograms, where you copy each and every one of the programs, and any of its associated INI files, etc., into its own folder under OldPrograms. Once that's done, navigate to each respective EXE file, bring up the context menu using SHIFT+F10, and choose the Send To option then the Desktop (Create Shortcut) secondary option and afterward you'll have functioning shortcuts on your desktop that point to the programs in a location where Windows can indeed access them. Brian
