The article says the path to the icon is cleared after a reboot, but what if it tries to access the icon first and fails to actually write the path to the short

The article says the path to the icon is cleared after a reboot, but what if it tries to access the icon first and fails to actually write the path to the shortcut (given that the filesystem is already hosed at that time). I wonder what happens if one creates the shortcut offline, e.g. using older MS-Windows, wine, reactOS or whatever. Then just copy the crafted lnk file to \Users\Public\Desktop and see what happens.