Sorted Links Keep Reverting Back to Alphabetical Order

[Guest]

IE 6, XP SP2, with all critical updates installed, as of Apr 13.
Exact IE version is 6.0.2900.2180.xpsp.060210-1526

This issue has started recently, probably with one of the latest updates
from Windows Update.

I customize the order of my IE links (favorites subfolder), so that the
most-used links appear across the top of the screen, and when I display
the others they are listed down the side in the order I want them.

Now, IE is auto-sorting it in alphabetical order.

I have seen many posts about this, never saw any answer from Microsoft,
though.

Is there anyone in this newsgroup who knows how to force IE to keep the
order of the Links?

 

[Robert Aldwinckle]

....

Is there anyone in this newsgroup who knows how to force IE to keep the
order of the Links?

Activating the Links bar and dragging the links in it to rearrange
their buttons has worked for me.

And in general dragging links around in the Favorites menu
has worked for me too.


---

 

[Guest]

It has also worked for me for the last 5 years. Not any more.
Now no matter how I arrange them, they keep on reverting to alphabetical
order the next day.
Funny how nobody can figure out what is causing this behaviour.

 

[Robert Aldwinckle]

It has also worked for me for the last 5 years. Not any more.
Now no matter how I arrange them, they keep on reverting to alphabetical
order the next day.
Funny how nobody can figure out what is causing this behaviour.

In that case use RegMon (e.g. filtering on Order)
to find out when it is being changed.
I would highlight SetValue to simplify your analysis.

That should catch writes of what looks like a binary string called Order
within a subkey called MenuOrder. How many Favorites do you have
in each folder? Perhaps you have coincidently exceeded an
implementation limit? Or perhaps this (q.v.) has been "fixed"? <eg>

<title>KB259735 - Favorites May Not Sort in Alphabetical Order</title>

BTW it looks as if that Order string *is* sorted alphabetically.
So the mechanism for preserving an unsorted order must depend
on some other information (e.g. an offset within it) for each item.
You would have to experiment by saving its value for different
arrangements of your links to find out how it works for sure.
OTOH perhaps this implementation is all carefully documented
somewhere in the MSDN. <EG>


Good luck

Robert
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[Guest]

Favorites is not the problem, they do remain in the order I set them in.
The problem only occurs for Links, which is odd because the Links folder is
a subfolder of the Favorites.
So, why does the Links folder get rearranged alphabetically at random times,
and the Favorites remains properly ordered ? Looks like no-one knows.
I'll try regmon as you suggest, but since this happens at random, it will be
hard to spot.
Anyway, by looking at the number of posts on various message groups on the
net, there are hundreds of people experiencing this problem. Someone in
Microsoft must have noticed.