I have created a direct shortcut to chess.exe which used to work perfectly fine. Now after some windows updates were installed today, my link will not work; I get a stop error dialog (red X) with one random kanji character and one random ascii character, and an ok button. But when I click the link through the start menu, Chess Titans loads fine.
I get the same stop when I click chess.exe in explorer. In my search for these files I found the other windows game .exes, and clicking on them produced similar results; Checkers, gives a similar stop dialog, and says parental control is blocking it (on
an administrator account no less), and Free Cell and Shanghai both do nothing at all. All these games work when I click the provided shortcut in the games folder, and chess used to work with my direct link. What did MS change that broke this? It appears to
be confined to Windows' included games.