Folders losing ability to be customised or being seen in cmd wind

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Guest

I'm running XP Home on a clean un-infected Dell 8300 PC, Norton Internet
Security and Spybot Search and Destroy reveal nothing amiss in those areas.

Prior to adding music to My Music I could see the customise tab on the
folder. After adding about 2Gb of albums into Windows Media Player 9 with the
files located in My Music by default, I noticed the folder no longer gave
access to this feature. This behaviour was also witnessed on My Brother's
Dell PC when he also started adding music to the media player library
(different house, different PC, same OS).

As time progressed I then started adding pictures into My Pictures and
movies into My Videos. The same thing has happened to those folders.

This is where is gets a little more weird. In normal window navigation from
the desktop I can see the folders in question but when I use the command
prompt and do a standard directory listing, the directories are not listed in
My Documents. I can however cd to the directories and see the contents of
each. These directories are however NOT hidden according to explorer
(right-click, properties).

I've read Microsoft's advice on the fact that some folders prevent the
re-setting of the read only attribute due to the folder being customised.
This is certainly an issue that is affecting the three folders but I'm not
yet convinced that it addresses the whole scenario as I don't believe any of
these folders have been customised and there is no mention about such
directories being hidden when enquiring from the command prompt. The same
named directories under my wife's login do not exhibit any of these problems.
The only practical difference seems to be that my directories hold more data.
It doesn't seem to be a problem until you have over ~2GB of data in any of
these 3 system directories.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/256614/EN-US

Before I start creating a restore point and messing with the Registry, I
wondered if anyone else has witnessed this behaviour or could kindly help ?
 
=?Utf-8?B?anVzdGFfbmV3Ymll?= said:
It doesn't seem to be a problem until you have over ~2GB of data in any of
these 3 system directories.
Click to expand...

Then limit the data in the directories to less than 2 gig.
 
justa_newbie said:
I'm running XP Home on a clean un-infected Dell 8300 PC, Norton Internet
Security and Spybot Search and Destroy reveal nothing amiss in those areas.

Prior to adding music to My Music I could see the customise tab on the
folder. After adding about 2Gb of albums into Windows Media Player 9 with the
files located in My Music by default, I noticed the folder no longer gave
access to this feature. This behaviour was also witnessed on My Brother's
Dell PC when he also started adding music to the media player library
(different house, different PC, same OS).

As time progressed I then started adding pictures into My Pictures and
movies into My Videos. The same thing has happened to those folders.

This is where is gets a little more weird. In normal window navigation from
the desktop I can see the folders in question but when I use the command
prompt and do a standard directory listing, the directories are not listed in
My Documents. I can however cd to the directories and see the contents of
each. These directories are however NOT hidden according to explorer
(right-click, properties).
Click to expand...

When you start using these folders their special status 'locks' them
from having it changed any more. Explorer views them in a special way -
the read only attribute is used to flag that this is being done; it has
no real meaning for a directory anyway. And some subfolders within will
be marked as hidden, so that their existence does not show to confuse
the presentation Explorer makes. So when you look in a Command Prompt
DIR they appear to be not there to a simple DIR - but can be CDed and
will show to a DIR /A
 
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