Explorer Doesn't Refresh After Creating New Folders in My Docs

08 Jun 2007

I reinstalled Win XP today and just spent the last half hour or more trying to figure out why Windows Explorer wasn't refreshing automatically whenever I created, renamed or deleted anything (so I had to press F5 a lot). Most of the things I found on the internet were about network shares, but this was happening locally.

Turns out the script I wrote to change all of my My Documents, Pictures, etc. locations to another drive was the culprit. Very subtle mistake... I set the My Documents location to "D:" instead of "d:\". (Not sure if it's the capitalisation or trailing \ but that seems to have been all it was!)

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders\Personal
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders\Personal

Or just right-click My Documents > Properties.

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