Making the IE shortcut survive an in-place upgrade in Windows 10

I wrote a post on how to add an Internet Explorer shortcut to the Start Menu in Windows 10 which turned out not to be the easiest thing to do. The post can be found here: https://ccmexec.com/2015/09/customizing-the-windows-10-start-menu-and-add-ie-shortcut-during-osd/

When I started to upgrade Windows 10 1507 – 1511 I realized that the “Internet Explorer.lnk” file is actually removed during the upgrade. It is actually removed wherever you put it, Program Files, Windows, Programdata and so on. It is a feature of in-place upgrade that has been around since Windows Vista!. Has it been an issue before? “NO!” but it will be now!

So we need to solve this, when doing modifications to Windows 10 like uninstalling apps and so on we must use a Task Sequence to upgrade from one Windows 10 version to the next otherwise all default apps will be installed and again for instance. So what we do is simply a step that copies the IE icon back after the upgrade is complete and the icon has been removed. The IE Shortcut must be there when the user logs on otherwise it will be removed from the start menu.

In our Windows 10 to Windows 10 upgrade Task Sequence it would look like this.

What I did was add a PowerShell script to the package I used for the Start Menu customization that copies the IE icon as well as imports the start menu layout in the first place.
Basically it is the same script but I don’t import the default start menu, I only copy the IE icon back to the location is was before the Windows 10 1507 – Windows 10 1511 Upgrade. So a very simple solution!

The script only does the copying of the IE shortcut so it is very simple.


Copy-Item -Path $PSScriptRoot'\StartMenufiles\internet explorer.lnk' -Destination $env:SystemDrive'\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Accessories'

That way we still have the Internet Explorer shortcut on the end users Start Menu after the upgrade.

I will cover this and much more on mine and Ronni Pedersen’s session at the Midwest Management Summit (MMS) in just  a couple of weeks! http://mmsmoa.com/ Hope to see you all there!