Restoring Windows Vista right-side Start menu
I spent the better part of this morning trouble-shooting the right side of my start menu on my Windows Vista drive, the portion of the menu that contains logged on user, Documents, Pictures, Music. For some strange reason after logon, my Documents shortcut stopped working. I'd click on Documents and nothing. I'd right click and go to properties and there was nothing there. I tried the obvious and google searched for how to fix it because it was driving me crazy. I couldn't find a single thing referencing how to fix the right side of the menu (although I found a ton of links with folks dead set against registry repair utilities). Long story short, I searched the registry myself and found the fix. If your shortcuts on your Start menu ever quit working, launch regedit and navigate to the following keys:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders
These hives contain all of the paths to the shell folders (desktop, documents, favorites, music, pictures, etc.). Just scan the list presented and ensure the paths are all correct to the appropriate folders. Somehow, my document folder ended up mapped to D:\Documents. Not sure how, don't ask, but setting this back to %userprofile%\documents and c:\users\username\documents corrected the issue.