Solved Solution for being unable to delete a broken pinned item from File Explorer/Quick Access

Wanted to quickly share a Windows 11 solution I found earlier this evening after hours of research without success.

Problem:
I had an old broken network share shortcut pinned to File Explorer (Quick Access being another term elsewhere in the OS) on the Windows taskbar. Every time I attempted unpin the offending shortcut File Explorer would hang indefinitely. I tried pinning a known-good shortcut, selecting both, then trying an unpin which had the same result. Various other solutions were tried with the same result (without going so far as delete the file entirely which would work but require tedious additional time to restore from scratch).

Solution:
What ended up working was quite simply booting into Safe Mode without Networking (the easiest way to accomplish this is likely via msconfig) and unpining said shortcut within that environment. Worked like a charm! Hopefully this saves someone else the pain I went through before finally figuring it out! I'd imagine this also works for Windows 10 as well but I haven't tested.

also In Normal Windows Mode , Network Shares are listed in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Shares registry key, you can delete the entries there, after a backup of the key first.

Spunk said:

also In Normal Windows Mode , Network Shares are listed in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Shares registry key, you can delete the entries there, after a backup of the key first.

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Thank you for the info, but this isn't applicable in my instance (the registry key you provided is empty for me). My specific problem was a shortcut I created to d$ on another computer in my home, and I removed the entire D: drive in said computer thus breaking the shortcut.

Any mapped network share will be here in this key, if you have already removed it, the key will be empty.

Spunk said:

Any mapped network share will be here in this key, if you have already removed it, the key will be empty.

Click to expand...

I still have a functional shortcut for c$, these aren't true "network shares." They're literally just a shortcut to an administrative share on another computer in my house (Workgroup, non-domain).