Microsoft recently said in the changelog that it could not recover the Defender update mistakenly deleted application shortcuts, but today officially released the Advanced Search Query Language (AHQ) and a PowerShell script that can find and recover some of the mistakenly deleted application shortcuts.
Microsoft has identified steps that customers can take to recreate Start Menu links for a significant subset of the affected applications that were deleted,” Microsoft explained in support documentation. These actions have been integrated into the PowerShell script below to help enterprise administrators take recovery actions in their environments.”
If affected, you can use this PowerShell script shared on GitHub, which will scan HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths\ registry keys to check if 33 different programs are installed on your computer.
A list of application shortcuts that can be found and recovered by
Adobe Acrobat
Adobe Photoshop 2023
Adobe Illustrator 2023
Adobe Creative Cloud
Firefox Private Browsing
Firefox
Google Chrome
Microsoft Edge
Notepad++
Parallels Client
Remote Desktop
TeamViewer
Royal TS6
Elgato StreamDeck
Visual Studio 2022
Visual Studio Code
Camtasia Studio
Camtasia Recorder
Jabra Direct
7-Zip File Manager
Access
Excel
OneDrive
OneNote
Outlook
PowerPoint
Project
Publisher
Visio
Word
PowerShell 7 (x64)
SQL Server Management Studio
Azure Data Studio
