Meehan said:
VanguardLH said:
Okay, so it is remembering folder customizations on which you want help.
When the custom picture disappears as the folder's icon, check if the
desktop.ini file has also disappeared (it is normally hidden because it
is a system file so you need to configure Windows Explorer to show
system files, not just hidden files). If the desktop.ini file doesn't
exist then neither does the customization for that folder.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555077
Since the entries in the desktop.ini file tell where to find the picture
to show as the folder's icon, you'll lose that display if you move the
picture file to elsewhere. Renaming the photo file, renaming one of the
folders in the path to that file, or moving the file to some other path
means desktop.ini won't find the file that was hard-coded into it.
http://www.xs4all.nl/~hwiegman/desktopini.html
This shows the entries found inside the desktop.ini file and their
purpose.
Vanguard,
Once again, thank you for your patience and help.
Well, I think we might be on the right lines here. On my system, the 'My
Documents' folder does have a very small desktop.ini file in it.
In full, that files reads as follows:
[DeleteOnCopy]
Owner=Robin
Personalized=5
PersonalizedName=My Documents
But almost none of the sub-folders within 'My Documents' have a
desktop.ini in them at all.
The one exception is the system-generated 'My Pictures' folder, which
does have a desktop.ini in it.
This also happens to be the only sub-folder in which _I_ have set to
show as thumbnail view, although the others are now changing themselves
to that randomly, as I've explained in my previous posts.
The 'My Pictures' desktop.ini reads:
[DeleteOnCopy]
Owner=Robin
Personalized=39
PersonalizedName=My Pictures
[.ShellClassInfo]
[email protected],-12688
IconFile=%SystemRoot%\system32\mydocs.dll
IconIndex=-101
However, although I remember customizing all the sub-folders within the
'My Pictures' folder into thumbnail view, and choosing a cover photo for
them all, none of these sub-folders contain a desktop.ini file either.
Am I correct in thinking that, from what you say, they should all have
one? Where have they all gone?'
Now you're getting into "special folders" defined by registry entries.
My Documents, My Pictures, My Music, and so on are defined under:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell
Folders
I know of this registry key but there could very well be others that
help define these special folders and how Windows Explorer is supposed
to give special handling for them (or it could be coded inside
explorer.exe). As such, Windows Explorer knows they are special folders
and gives them some basic handling that differentiates them from normal
folders. While they may have a desktop.ini to permit some user-level
customization, they are already treated by Windows Explorer as special
folder. For example, you could delete the My Pictures folder and then
create a new folder by the same name. However, you create a folder
object would result in you creating a normal folder, not a special one
with definitions in the registry to make them "special" folders.
For the non-special folders, you need to have a desktop.ini to retain
any customization settings for those normal folders. If you have
Windows Explorer configured to show system files then you might be
deleting the desktop.ini file by accident. If you move folders around
or rename the folders then the path to, say, the picture file is no
longer valid (but you'd have to check if a relative or absolute path to
the image file was specified; however, obviously if the image file is
deleted or renamed then it can't be used to show a picture for that
folder).
You might be using some cleanup utility that deletes the desktop.ini
file(s). For example, at one time (before v2.00.495), CrapCleaner
(whose name got cleaned up to CCleaner) would delete the desktop.ini
files; see
http://www.ccleaner.com/download/version-history. Could be
CCleaner or some other cleanup utility is wiping out your customizations
by deleting the desktop.ini files.
Another place where there is no desktop.ini file is on my desktop
itself. Should there be one there?
The desktop is not a folder. The %userprofile%\Desktop folder is used
to track what icons or shortcuts you have added to the desktop. The
desktop is managed by explorer.exe (Windows Explorer). Yep, that's
right. Windows Explorer is also the desktop manager. There is a
registry entry that specifies which desktop manager gets used so you
could use a 3rd party (non-Microsoft) desktop manager.
I remember seeing users do this in 9x-based versions of Windows but have
rarely seen anyone do it with NT-based versions of Windows. I don't
even recall the name of the registry key where you define what desktop
manager gets used. Been way too long since I've seen users clamoring
for an alternate desktop manager for NT-based versions of Windows. I
did find mention of one old one (RbVdesktop) but I think that company is
defunct. A screen image can be seen at:
http://www.downloadthat.com/images/screen/RbVdesktop-43218.jpg
http://regnow.img.digitalriver.com/vendor/13790/RN-Screenshot.jpg
http://www.filebuzz.com/software_screenshot/full/desktop3d-47849.jpg
(Mostly notice the shortcuts for applications and files on the desktop
versus the childish background image chosen by whomever took a screen
capture of their desktop.)
(There were two files called thumbs.db on my desktop, but I deleted them
both a couple of days ago. It puzzled me at the time how there could be
two files with identical names in the same place, but as you had said at
the time, deleting them made no difference to my folder behaviour anyhow.)
You sure that perhaps just the filename was displayed for those objects
on your desktop and that they might've been shortcuts that had different
paths to those files? For example, one might be to C:\path1\thumbs.db
and the other to C:\path2\thumbs.db and both showed "thumbs.db" in the
title for the shortcut.
