After the installation of of all my applications im left with a load of program short cuts that make the desktop look a mess!. How would I go about deleting these as one job lot. I know DEL ink has something to do with it?

you have to use DOS commands to copy/remove your shorcuts.

look at this examples to get you started:

to copy a shortcut

xcopy "%UserProfile%\Men£ Inicio\Programas\URUSoft\Subtitle Workshop\Subtitle Workshop.lnk" "%AllUsersProfile%\Men£ Inicio\Programas\Video Tools\Subtitulos\" /Y /Q

to delete a shortcut:

DEL /f /q "%AllUsersProfile%\Men£ Inicio\Windows Update.lnk"

to delete a folder:

RD /S /Q "%AllUsersProfile%\Men£ Inicio\Programas\ffdshow\"

to copy a folder:

xcopy "%AllUsersProfile%\Men£ Inicio\Programas\AviSynth 2.5" "%AllUsersProfile%\Men£ Inicio\Programas\Video Tools\AviSynth" /Y /Q /I

all you have to know is where your shortcuts are locate, allusersprofile or userprofile. thats all.

Thanks for your help. Ill give it a try.