Applications missing from 'All Programs' section

[ukdave]

Operating system is Windows XP Professional (SP1).

During the last 3 weeks I have installed various Microsoft packages e.g. Microsoft
Visual Basic.NET 2003, MS Access 2003 etc. They all indicated that the
installations were successful. And, yes they do get installed in C:\Program
Files. However, these programs do not appear in the listing when you click
on START and then ALL PROGRAMS.

Other recently installed programs (which are not Microsoft products
apart from 2 referred to below) do appear correctly. Is there some special
Microsoft Installer that is present at the installation that could be
causing this please? It seems such a co-incidence it is just Microsoft. An
interesting point is I have installed two Microsoft Products from a CD-ROM
included with a study book I am using, ASP.NET the Web Matrix and
the Microsoft Net Framework SDK and
they BOTH INSTALLED CORRECTLY, appearing in ALL PROGRAMS.

It is the brand new purchased software such as I describe above that just
does not want to place the information so that it can be seen in that ALL
PROGRAMS section. Any ideas please? and thanks in advance for your help.

I have created a shortcut myself from the [.exe] file that was relevant and
placed it on the desktop and programs work fine from here. But I understand
from others that this is definitely not good practice and I must find out
what is happening about this. Many thanks in advance for any help on this.

David

[ghost2003]

When you installed did you check for an option to put a shortcut in the start menu? You can just to to C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs and put the shortcuts there and they will appear in your all programs menu