IE Favorites all wrong

[Stephen Porter]

Hi,

OS: Win XP Home
Computer: Dell PC

Somehow IE has lost it's pointer to my Favorites Folder. All my
Favorites disappeared and have been replaced by *all* the folders
under the "Windows" folder on my hard drive. I don't dare delete
anything since they are live folders/files and if I delete them
through the "Organize Favorites" dialog, they will disappear from my
hard drive.

I checked and my actual Favorites folder is still intact under the
"My Documents" folder, as it always was. It's just that IE somehow
has lost track of this and substituted this incorrect (and dangerous)
pointer to my system files.

Any help much appreciated. I'd like to just fix IE so that it
points to my actual Favorites folder.

TIA.

 

[Alan Edwards]

You appear to have a wrong Registry entry.

You can change the value of Favorites in the Registry in these
two keys:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell
Folders

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User
Shell Folders

....Alan

 

[Stephen Porter]

Hi Alan,

Thanks for the tip... Actually just before I got your email I went
through the entire registry searching on "Favorites" and found
several entries that had somehow been changed from the correct entry
to "C:\Windows" -- which resulted in all the sytem files showing up
in Favorites. However, I made all the changes and all I was able to
do was to get an EMPTY favorites folder. So there must be something
else screwed up in the Registry.

I kind of bailed out and created a new user and then just copied the
old Favorites and My Documents over and that seems to have worked.
I'm curious about how to actually fix it, but hit the wall on having
to get this system functioning correctly again.

If you have any other theories, I'm interested!

Thanks again.

Stephen Porter

You appear to have a wrong Registry entry.

You can change the value of Favorites in the Registry in these
two keys:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell
Folders

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User
Shell Folders

...Alan

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