Today I was doing my normal thing at work when I double clicked on a jpg that was on my desktop. I expected this file to open quickly as a preview in Windows Photo Gallery as they always do. Except this time, nothing happened. I quickly restarted my computer, thinking that something may be hung in memory, but upon logging back into my fresh desktop, the same thing happened again.
Upon doing a little bit of reasearch, I saw that I had dragged a link from Internet Explorer onto my desktop. This created an internet shortcut with a long, Internet Explorer assigned name. This link was not anything I needed and wasn't even intentionally dragged to my desktop, so I deleted it.
After deleting it, Windows Photo Gallery opened my JPGs with no problem.
What I believe happened was that the name of the shortcut was way too long for Windows Photo Gallery to parse when it scanned the folder I tried to open my JPG in, thus preventing it from opening.
Problem Sovled.
