Bleg: odd computer issue

A couple days ago I noticed that my desktop shortcut for Itunes was broken.  As in, no cute little picture, it was no longer associated with any files, and attempting to delete it resulted in ‘access denied, file in use…’.  Weird.  Reinstalled/repaired Itunes, took the newly created shortcut, which worked, and tossed it into the desktop folder where that set of shortcuts is kept.  Where it promptly broke again.  Wtf?

Uninstalled Itunes, reinstalled Itunes, with reboot inbetween.  Same problem.  Shortcut is fine till I attempt to move it.

Created a couple duplicate shortcuts of random things and attempted to move them into random folders.  Same problem.

Now, I can go into safe mode, change the security settings for those individual files and delete them, but thats annoying.  Oh, and its only shortcuts.  Attempting to move any other file type appears to work just fine.

So I loaded into safe mode, updated and ran Malwarebytes.  Came back clean.  Ok, really weird.

I’m currently attempting a restore to a version from a week ago, but I’m not sure, off the top of my head, when the last Itunes update was, so I’m not sure when exactly I really need to go back to.

I’m running XP sp3.

Does this ring a bell at all?

Edited: Figured out when the last Itunes update went through, since the problem likely occured before that, and pushed the restore back to a week before that.  The restore FIXED the broken Itunes shortcut, but any shortcuts newly moved (after the restore) still break when they’re moved….I hate to go any further back, its almost a month as is.  I guess I need to just consider breaking down and backing up my files and doing a clean install to 7 like I keep saying I’m going to….

Edited again (saturday morning): discovered in the process of doing backups that although it’ll backup the files to the external drive with no issues, some of the odds and ends that are “newer”, zip-files and .exe downloads, apparently also got screwed up by the problem (I downloaded them, installed the program, and tossed the zip into the folder to archive later), though at least a couple OLD .exe (self contained programs with no other files) did not get messed up when I played with them.  So I have to re-download those directly to the external drive.  Husband and I were talking about it, and a couple months ago I DID have trouble with a couple of windows updates that weren’t taking right.  They were security updates, we THOUGHT we’d gotten them to install ok, but maybe not….I haven’t been doing much on the computer lately though, so its possible its been that long….