Windows 8 keeps removing some start screen shortcuts I make

Question

I've made some custom shortcuts to Google Chrome profiles and successfully pin them to my start screen but when my computer reboots or goes to sleep and wakes they have disappeared. If i repin them they appear with a (2) or high number meaning they're already there by that same name. However they don't appear anywhere on the start screen or under all apps. If I use the search feature to find them they don't show anymore.

An example of one of the shortcuts details is:

Name: Work Profile Chrome

Target: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --profile-directory="Profile 1"

EDIT: It appears you can only have one Chrome shortcut. In order from left to right I had this shortcuts setup:

• Work Profile Chrome
• Non-profit Profile Chrome
• Google Chrome < normal shortcut
• Personal Profile Chrome

After it removed my icons again I was left with only Personal Profile Chrome shortcut. I have repeated the steps of completely remaking and repining the shortcuts many times. It keeps happening.

Answer 1

I've also encountered this precise problem. I have worked around this in two ways:

• One way of dealing with it is to install distinct derivatives of Chromium -- one for each profile you regularly use:

  1. Google Chrome
  2. Google Chrome Canary (since Canary is specifically designed, unlike Beta, to operate independently of other Google Chrome releases)
  3. Chromium
  4. Opera
  5. Comodo Dragon
  6. SRWare Iron

• A more complex, but more efficient, way of dealing with it is to open the Chrome application by proxy, as it were, through a different application. What you will see happening below is this: the actual shortcut in Start will not be launching Chrome directly, but rather will be launching the Windows Script Host, which in turn will be loading a simple script which finally launches Chrome.

  Here is how you do that:

  1. Create a text file ending in the extension ".vbs" (such as, in this example, testprofilechrome.vbs), which includes the following code (you may need to alter the path to your instance of chrome.exe, and be sure to change Profile 1 in the code below to whatever profile ID you want to launch with this script):

     Set WinScriptHost = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
     WinScriptHost.Run Chr(34) & "C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" & Chr(34) & " --profile-directory=" & Chr(34) & "Profile 1" & Chr(34), 0
     Set WinScriptHost = Nothing
     

     This looks more complex than it is, but all it does is launch Chrome. This is the same thing offered on ServerFault here and described by Microsoft here.

  2. Next, create a new shortcut, but set it up the following way:
     • Set Target: to C:\Windows\System32\wscript.exe testprofilechrome.vbs //B //Nologo
     • Set Start in: to "C:\Users\[Username]\Documents\Chrome Launchers". This is important: put here the path where your .vbs script resides.
     • Click Change Icon... and change the icon to something that will help you identify which profile it is.
     • Click OK.
  3. Right-click on your new shortcut and hit Pin to Start.
  4. Repeat for all your other profiles.

  Here is a screenshot of the resulting files for two profiles.

  And here is a screenshot of the final product in Start.