HelpWindows7.com

[isodor]

How to Hide and Remove Shortcut Arrow in Windows 7?

[owen]

Here are the steps
(1)Start the registry Editor(RegEdit)
(2)Navigate to the following key.
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\lnkfile

(3) Rename Shorertcut to another name such as IsNotShortcut
Or
Delete the IsShortcut registry value in the right pane.
(4) To remove shortcut arrow from the desktop icon in windows 7, locate each of the following registry keys, and then perform steps 2 to 3 above to remove the shortcut arrow:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\piffile
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\ConferenceLink
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\DocShortCut
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\InternetShortcut
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\WSHFile

(5) Close regedit.

(5) Logout and login again or reboot.

[oswold]

Since the above steps require registry changes, so don’t forget to back up the registry before you do changes.

[baldwin]

In some cases deactivating the shortcut arrow for *.LNK files can result in duplicate items in the Explorer context menu and may also give an error “ unable to pin shortcut to Taskbar or Start Menu”. To avoid this issue, use another workaround to try the following steps
Run--> command prompt (open with administrative rights) -->Run the following command line statement
REG ADD “HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Icons” /v 29 /d %SystemRoot%\System32\shell32.dll,50 /f