spontaneous shortcuts

[carlos]

I have mysterious shorcuts appearing spontaneously on my
desktop. They have the standard Microsoft page icon and
are labeled with a ~. Any ideas?

[Rich Barry]

The ~ file is the backup file for your address book. Do you have Outlook
Express or Outlook? The April patch for Outlook Express Q330994 created this
problem. You can remove this update from the Add/Remove Programs and the
problem will be gone. (Warning: 1 out 3 clients had to reload Outlook
Express again after removing Q330994 patch.) Or you can live with it and
wait for the next Outlook update, which may get rid of it.

What happens normally is when you update your address book, it is stored in
the address book folder. In the same folder, the backup address file is
updated, for example, user.wab becomes user.wa~ . But the April patch
caused this user.wa~ not to be updated. Instead the backup file ~ is
created on the desktop. If you open it, you may recognize some content of
your address book.

Best wishes, war1

"carlos" > wrote in message
...
> I have mysterious shorcuts appearing spontaneously on my
> desktop. They have the standard Microsoft page icon and
> are labeled with a ~. Any ideas?