Flounder said:
Works like the proverbial charm!
Hat's off to you for your help!!
Good to hear! Especially since it means I read you right. That you
didn't mind exerting some minutes of manual labor. And that you
were already familiar with things like creating reg files.
. . . .
I wanted to add here one additional thing. You hadn't brought this
up, but it's just in case you wanted your start menu sorted as well....
If you were to look with your registry editor, you'll see that its
sorting data is next door to that for favorites. Two subkeys off
of "menuorder."
HKCU\...\MenuOrder\Favorites\
HKCU\...\MenuOrder\Start Menu\
You can straighten those both out at once, with a single line:
------------------------------------------------------------------sortmenu.reg
REGEDIT4
[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\MenuOrder]
------------------------------------------------------------------sortmenu.reg
Note, Windows will recreate that MenuOrder key, to make subkeys beneath it,
for each item you add or move in favorites or startmenu. That's why we have
do the amputation as a regular routine.
A small bonus: cutting that key, even when only done occasionally, it
trims some 5 lbs of bloat. That menuorder reg pocket can get pretty
stuffed, w its fatty binary values -- especially when you have a whole
lot of individual favorites and/or startmenu items that Windows is tracking.
I cannot document any measurable speed gain from cleaning it off. But I
do know I like just the mere fact of having Windows display my menu objects
straightaway, without first constantly shuffling through a whole pile of
order-arrangement data.
Anyway. If you choose to use the regfile above, to sort both startmenu
and favorites at once, all your remaining steps are of course the same
as before...
--------------------------------------------------------------sortmenu.bat
REGEDIT /S sortmenu.reg
cls
--------------------------------------------------------------sortmenu.bat
...Put the bat and the reg put together in the same folder. Create a
shortcut/PIF from the bat to your StartUp group. Right-click the PIF,
and change its properties to Run Minimized, and Close on Exit.
If you're not rebooting too often, thus the StartUp group not being often
processed, then you can of course manually click the PIF on occasion.
Or if you're using some kind of scheduler, tell it to run it.
. . . .
I'd initially mentioned running this action during an early stage of the
Windows bootup process. (Where btw you would need to change the regkey to
HKU\.default, plus additional HKU\ keys if profiles enabled.) Yet after
thinking it over - especially with the consideration of it being XP we're
talking here - I've now more settled on the idea that having the PIF link
in the StartUp group is the preferred strategy.
Amongst considerations towards my conclusion is that you XP folks don't
get to autorun commands off an autoexec.bat during boot time. And a reg
run key would not be worth the inconvenience. A pif file accessible at
any time is a lot handier. Especially since you're probably just not
rebooting all that often. Not as when it's 9x shaping the show, constantly
demanding its "power naps."
)