Unable to perform soft Restart or Shutdown

After deleting "non damaging" adware cookies, I am now unable to perform a Start>Shutdown>Restart or Start>Shutdown>Shutdown from the Windows Start button on the lower toolbar. When I sucessfully reboot by using the mechanical computer Restart switch, I get 2 popups:

"Problem with Shortcut
Drive or network connection that the shortcut GStartup.lnk refers to is unavailable. Make sure disk is properly inserted or network resource is available. "

The 2nd popup is for the shortcut DateManager.lnk.

Any suggestions how to restore the functionality w/o having to reinstall the OS and losing all my installed programs would be appreciated.

I have a mirror image back-up of the HD but it is, unfortunately, a couple of years old.

Is there a way to manually edit the registry to restore the functions?

Sinchi

 

Problem solved

Arie and Lonny Jones:

I downloaded Spybot S&D, updated and ran it per your instructions.

I was then able to make the soft reboot and shutdown perform as they should via the lower toolbar Start>Shutdown>Restart or Shutdown buttons.

I rebooted and ran AD-Aware SE Plus which I installed previously and ran it per your instructions. It found 18 instances of malware, which were fixed per your instructions.

After running Digital River's "SpeedUpMyPC ", I plan to make a mirror back up of the HD with a secondary HD I have on this computer and then perform an OS upgrade from 2000 to Win XP Pro.

Thanks alot for your explicit and accurate instructions. The instructions provided with the above program are very unclear. Although the computer seems to be operating OK now, should I run the additional malware detection and removal programs you have suggested?

Sinchi Tonooka