I have Windows 2000 Professional on this computer.
Whenever I start a copy of Windows Explorer now, I no longer have any type of
menu bar along the top, as I did prior to today. Instead, the only thing
displayed at the top is the title of the current folder. If I hit the "F11"
key, then even that title bar goes away.
In the body of the window, the files and folders in the current directory,
along with their attributes are displayed; I have the "Detail" view active.
I've tried the "Customize the Current Folder" option, but none of the
available templates (Standard, Classic, Simple, or Image Preview) bring back
the familiar menu bar along the top.
Can anyone tell me how to get the menu bar back?
Well, I'm happy to report that I found the solution; and I'm sharing it, as
described below, so that others that have this problem may benefit. (By the
way, I found that at least one person that had this problem actually gave up
after 4 months, and reinstalled his operating system.)
Finding the solution took me over 2 hours last night (which is a whole lot
better than 2 months, or not finding it at all). And unfortunately, I was
not able to get any assistance from the microsoft.com website on the problem.
Just to clarify, the problem I had, described above, would NOT go away if:
* I right-clicked on the top title bar of the window (no useful options
came up).
* I selected the "Customize This Folder..." option, obtained by right-
clicking in the window body; and then choosing any of the available views
(such as "Classic").
* I typed "F11".
* I typed "Alt-F" or "Alt-V".
The solution is:
* Select "Start/ Run"; then type "regedit" (to start the Registry Editor);
then click on "Ok".
* After the Registry Editor starts, select the following folder:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Toolbar
... there are are 3 sub-folders under the "Toolbar" folder: "Explorer",
"ShellBrowser", and "WebBrowser". For each of these 3 folders, do the
following: Select the entry "ITBarLayout". Right-click on this entry and
delete it. (It's not enough to do this just for the "Explorer" sub-folder.)
I found this solution using "
www.groups.google" (since Google purchased the
now-defunct Deja View news group archive and search service). I found only
ONE news group thread with the correct solution (paraphrased above), out of
the 433 that matched my search. The solution was posted by Doug Knox
(
www.dougknox.com), in a post dated 28-Feb-2002.
Thanks very much, Mr. Knox, for the solution.
A question for the Microsoft corporation: I've installed ALL of the upgrades
for my OS, Windows 2000 Professional, but I first started having the problem
described here over 6 months ago. How can this be? Shouldn't there be a
patch implemented? I see that quite a number of people have reported this
problem, and it is extremely annoying.
