After a number of frustrating attempts to use my wiles and do tricky stuff a light bulb went on. If the links do not perform a function requested the system must not know what to do. How do you tell what to do. Went to CONTROL PANEL, TOOLS, FOLDER OPTIONS, FILE TYPES and added a file type of LNK, used the ADVANCED OPTIONS - ASSOCIATED FILE TYPE and told it to treat it as a SHORTCUT. Was also having the same problem with EXE's and COM's. Only difference was selected APPLICATION and DOS APPLICATION as the associated FILE TYPE
Everything started working and still does three days later