PA Bear said:
Forwarded to MSN Discussion newsgroup via crosspost.
Posted last December by StephenB. I haven't tried it either.
Good luck.
Earle
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Fix Corrupt MSN Favorites
Note that I am unable to completely validate the process. I do not have
corrupted favorites and I am not using MSN as the ISP. I checked the process
out
on a PC connected with another ISP and using MSN Premium.
If you choose to perform the procedure below, you are doing so at your own
risk.
Any data loss or corruption is not our responsibility! I think that the
process
looks like it will work, but it could be daunting if you are not comfortable
with the computer. If you do use this and it works, please answer back.
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Before starting, open Windows Explorer and go to Tools/Options and set the
options to Display Hidden files and folders *and* display protected system
files.
The first step is to rename the favorites.xml and favcache.xml files on the
affected account.
To do this, browse to C:\Documents and Settings\{userID}\Application
Data\MSN6\UserData\
** on my system, the folder is \UserData\ - Will had \AppData\ in the
instructions **
(Easy way to get here is to type "%appdata%\MSN6\UserData" into the Run box)
In the UserData folder, there'll be one of more GUID folders
(eg. {342342-432fds-43223-432423}), rename the favorites.xml and
favcache.xml
files to .old in each of these folders.
** on my system, I have 9 sub-accounts. I browsed each of the folders in the
UserData folder and changed the view to "Icons" so that I could see the
actual
picture for usertile.bmp. That file is the Display Picture, so when I saw my
display picture for the Primary account I knew I was in the right folder.
Next step is to connect to the MSN favorites network share and repair the
corrupted .xml file. To do this, open a My Computer window and click Tools >
Map
Network Drive and enter the following info in the boxes:
Drive: "Z:"
Folder: "
http://www.msnusers.com/mywebdocuments/programfiles/msn6"
** do not include the quotes **
Uncheck "Reconnect at login" and click "Connect using a different username".
Enter the affected email address (
[email protected]) and password here,
click OK and then click finish.
This will open a Z: drive My Computer window with a file called
favorites.xml in
it. Copy this file to your desktop and open it in Notepad.
To repair this XML file and upload it back to the server, we have to add a
line
and change some text.
Once you have the favorites.xml file that you saved on the desktop open in
Notepad, add
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
to the very start of the document.
Following this new line you added, is the first text from the original file
and
in a corrupt Favorites.xml file, it reads:
<html sortedby="title" direction="ascending">
Change this to read:
<favorites sortedby="title" direction="ascending">
At the bottom of the corrupt file the last line reads:
</html>
Change this to read:
</favorites>
Find the section of code that starts with:
<head>
<noscript>JavaScript...
.....
.....
</head>
<body onload="javascript
oSubmit();" />
*** there may be several lines of code in this section between <head> and
</head> along with the final line of <body onload...
In the sample file Will sent, this section is near the end of the corrupt
XML
file. The last two lines in the file are a line <favfolder created... and
</html> which we changed to </favorites> in the earlier part of these
instructions ****
Delete this entire section of code between <head> and </head> (including
those
tags) and the next line of code, the <body onload= line.
Now save the file to your desktop, overwriting the original.
Now right click and copy the edited Favorites.xml from your desktop and go
to
the Windows Explorer/My Computer window that shows the Z:\ drive with the 3
XML
files in it on the MSN server - paste the file in this folder and overwrite
the
one that is on the server.
Close the Notepad file, and close the mapped drive Explorer Window.
Open MSN Explorer, sign in and you should now have a fixed Favorites file.
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