The dead links could be anywhere, they could be on another site, that people are clicking. They could be typing in a wrong link.
The point is, they are seeing the error page, and the online menu is correctly displaying that they are seeing an error page.
You can not view the error page directly as it redirects you back to the news, you can only view it when you type in a wrong page, such as the link I posted.
To get this in the first place, you must have renamed the e107.htacesss to just .htaccess and you can stop e107 handling errors by remove the .htaccess file.