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Why did all of my Steam Shortcuts turned into Print Dialog?

Recently after a bit of registry cleaning, my desktop stopped launching games from Steam. I tried to troubleshoot this, and ended up spending HOURS chasing something that seems rather popular but nobody seem to have a proper solution.

The symptoms are simple: all of the shortcuts on the desktop turned into the blank "white page" icons. When you right click it, it doesn't say what app to open it with. Its type is "Internet Shortcut (url). 

Deleting it and recreating it from within Steam (gear icon // Create Desktop Shortcut) doesn't help. It seems the .URL handler is completely f-ed up.

I tried reinstalling Steam, and Steam actually did delete all the old files and reinstalled its own files. No change.  

So I go look for a registry fix... Except...  .url is NO LONGER A SUPPORTED file type in Windows 11. It's kept in as a backward compatibility setting only. So you have to search Win10 fixes. 

So I found this fix via WinhelpOnline. Download the reg zip, unzip, and apply. 

I got an error, Error 5. So I research the error 5. It's a permission error. 

Except I am the administrator. There is no one above me (at least on this machine). 

I then tried Nirsoft's FileTypesMan, a utility that lets you check the file types and the handler, instead of mess with registry directly. Maybe I just don't understand this thing, and this would help. 

.url is there, and it has 3 actions: Open / Print / Printto. Default action is Open. 

Then I realized it says Open: Disabled. Tried to edit it. Permission error, same Error 5. 

So I opened the registry section directly and tried to compare Open vs Print. It went directly to print, which means that works. 

The only difference between the two is Open has a "LegacyDisable" registry setting, Print doesn't. Researching that shows that if you put that setting in that key, Windows will pretend that that key doesn't exist. I guess they meant it to be easily reverted instead of outright deleting that key. 

So I tried deleting LegacyDisable. Won't let me. Apparently I lack permission. 

Weird... Checked RegEdit... then permissions... Hmmm... Somehow I do NOT, despite being an Administrator, "full access" to this registry key. 

So I tried to give myself full access. And after a bit of faffing around, managed to do so. 

Now the game .URLs will launch the game, but won't show the right icons. 

Maybe I need to merge that .URL reg fix again... 

UPDATE: This is caused by Wise Registry Cleaner. I just ran it again, and it put back the LegacyDisable registry entry.     

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