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re: Vista keeps mixing up folder types and icons Tuesday, August 5, 2008 at 6:11 am Posted by Charlie Hadden (854 messages posted) I worked with that same problem on my machine. For a fact this was one of the very few Vista problems I have ever experienced on one of my personal machines. I am giving you a link below to read about how I went about the fix. Since I have changed my BAG limit to 20,000 The problem has not returned. http://www.vistahelp.ca/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1618 [Reply or follow-up to this message] re: Vista keeps mixing up folder types and icons Tuesday, August 5, 2008 at 11:50 pm Posted by murlough23 (4 messages posted) Your proposed fix doesn't seem to have resolved the problem I did the regedits to increase the BagMRU size and turn off automatic folder type detection, and then restarted my computer. Still having problems. It seems to change a folder's thumbnail (often to a picture not even contained within the folder) when I either show/hide the folder, put new files into the folder, or move/rename the folder. I can't get Vista to stop "thinking for me" here. [Reply or follow-up to this message] re: Vista keeps mixing up folder types and icons Wednesday, August 6, 2008 at 7:45 am Posted by Charlie Hadden (854 messages posted) It would appear that your problem is of a different nature. I just want to make sure you have explored all of the view features in Tools/Folder Options/View. Once set Vista should as all previous version keep your settings. The reg. mods I listed are the only ones I know of (and are well documented) that reset these settings. Yes after doing the reset you have to start over re-defining all of your view particulars for each instance, but other than increasing the BAG limit this should stay stable afterwards. I have a tremendous amount of settings so my BAG limit had to be increased. Sorry if it didn't help and hope you get your system the way you want it. [Reply or follow-up to this message] re: Vista keeps mixing up folder types and icons Wednesday, August 6, 2008 at 11:51 am Posted by murlough23 (4 messages posted) Wow, so Vista has no solution for this? That's frustrating. I seem to have gotten it to the point where my Music folders are stable, and for the rest, I seem to have narrowed it down to the action of adding new items to a folder. That's what seems to change the settings automatically (and arbitrarily). Guess I'll have to hit up Microsoft's help pages... but searching those is a total pain, and I'm not going to pay them just to tell me how to fix their flawed OS. [Reply or follow-up to this message] re: Vista keeps mixing up folder types and icons Thursday, August 7, 2008 at 7:43 am Posted by Charlie Hadden (854 messages posted) I have just run into something that may have influenced MY problem that I mentioned earlier. I have three Registry backups that I did not make myself and they are dated in the Jan. and Feb. I am going to make a guess that it could be possible that my machine is trying to go back to these files either during a failed boot situation or for some similar unknown reason and recalling the Folder setting info from there. This is only a guess, but worth investigating. You may look into this yourself. [Reply or follow-up to this message] re: Vista keeps mixing up folder types and icons Saturday, August 9, 2008 at 12:16 pm Posted by murlough23 (4 messages posted) I did some further poking around on my computer to see if I could figure out what specific actions triggered the unwanted changes. I told my system to show the normally hidden operating system files so that I could play with Folder.jpg and Desktop.ini in certain folders. Desktop.ini in each folder is supposed to contain data regarding the type of folder and the preview image to use, and Folder.jpg is supposed to be the actual preview image. But changing these didn't seem to take effect immediately. Even more confusingly, if I delete Desktop.ini and then browse inside a folder and change its view, it creates a new Desktop.ini (that part's expected) and sometimes randomly grabs a preview image from the thumbnail cache and puts its location in Desktop.ini, but doesn't create a Folder.jpg for it. I managed to find the location of the thumbcache_*.db files, but I don't know how to read them. I was hoping to investigate those for evidence of unwanted changes and/or Windows grabbing the wrong reference from them when trying to determine the preview image for a folder. My hypothesis is that the order of the references listed in the thumbcache isn't consistent with what Windows expects it to be, possibly due to the fact that I've assigned preview images to certain folders and then hidden them and/or renamed one of their parent folders. But I have Automatic Folder Type Discovery turned off, so I'm not sure why Vista is trying to do anything "automatic" behind my back at all! Curioser and curioser... [Reply or follow-up to this message] re: Vista keeps mixing up folder types and icons Saturday, August 9, 2008 at 2:56 pm Posted by Charlie Hadden (854 messages posted) Curious YES! It almost sounds like you have an errant 'Default Program' BUT just for the ICONS. Not for what actually opens a particular file. You got it about the regeneration of the INI file. That is standard. With the speed of modern machines having a set INI there is not even required. The only other thing I can offer is a link to Vista forums that have a wide variety of folder fixes and hacks. You might run into something there that will lock this problem down for you. http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/?filter[11]=File%20Folder%20Settings [Reply or follow-up to this message] Tip: Use one of the [Reply or follow-up to this message] links above to add a message to this thread Search this forum Start a new thread on a different subject Report abuse of the forum Return to the Windows Vista Discussion Forum