Shortcuts now keeping 'Target' a secret??

Are you talking about Office shortcuts?

OFF2000: Unable to Modify Office Shortcuts

Office 2000 Shortcuts Do Not Have the "Pin to Start Menu" Command

linney,
Yes, This one is an Office Shortcut, but the neither of the two articles directly address it--this is Office XP on Windows XP sp2--the first article specifies Win98, ME, and 2000, but it appears close enough, I'm just going to assume the same problem was perpetuated for xp...
Thanks,
--Jim

I do not see a "problem" with XP using CLSID based shortcuts. But you can view the paths. Linney gave the hint above: drag the shortcut somewhere else.

Dragging to the Start menu will expand the shortcut target to its real path. Usually dragging to another folder will also do this. For example, the Office shortcuts are installed in a folder Program Files\Microsoft Office\OfficeXX\Startup

Drag one to your desktop and view the path in the shortcut target.

bcastner,
No dice. I dragged the Access shortcut from the desktop to the Start Menu--both by going into Windows Explorer and dragging from the desktop folder to the docs & settings\user\start menu folder, and also by just dragging from the desktop itself to the start button. I even right-clicked and did 'create shortcut', and it still is the same:

The 'Target' box is greyed out and just says 'Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003'. No path.

It's somewhat moot now because I've manually created them, but from an academic standpoint I'm very curious as to why the significant change? I understand that if it's clsid based then the actual path is fetched from the registry, but why not just have the real path there? I mean, it's not like people are going to be hacking the shortcuts or changing the install paths, so it seems, to me anyway, that the old way worked fine.
--Jim

Jim,

The CLSID method has been used for a while. The notion appeals to me as Microsoft moves away from anything that creates a "tattoo" in the registry or on the Desktop.

The movement of the OS is towards virtualization, and tattoos with specific device paths becomes more difficult. Moreover, there is the elegant notion that any reference to an object is resolved in one place, HKEY_CURRENT_ROOT\CLSID This substantially reduces the iffy and overhead laden attempt to resolve all shortcuts and references to an Object by finding them all and modifying them.

bcastner,
Yes, that is no doubt a more elegant way. My issue here was that I have Access shortcuts with different command-line options, so I needed the old-style shortcut...and I admit to a bit of lazyness in just wanting to copy/paste and add the cmd line options, instead of digging into explorer to find msaccess.exe and create it there.
Thanks,
--Jim

I would like clsid based shortcuts much better, if they actually allowed you to alter or browse the clsid you wanted the shortcut to point to.