Solved IE splitting favorites into two files

Hi everyone.

This is my first posting on the forums. I'm not a computer genius, but by no means a newbie. People come to me for computer help, but my own problem here... I cannot figure out, nor can my far more knowledgable friends. As someone who saves a lot of favorites, this problem is getting hard to ignore.

My issue is with my favorites list, as you'd assume. Lately I've noticed I save favorites and although they're in the list, they're not saving normally.

When saving some favorites, they'll often split into two separate files. I'll get one file that includes the web page title in its name, but includes no URL whatsoever. Click it and nothing happens... because there is no target. But usually (yet not always), a second file will exist with the URL target included. The file name, however, will be the URL of the page in the typical file name format replacing a slash with a dash and omitting the http and www. while deleting any question marks in the URL.

I'll end up with two files, for example, like this:

File 1 title) "Vista Forums - Post New Thread" -- but no URL target included
File 2 title) "vistax64.com-newthread.phpdo=newthread&f=3" -- URL target included

This happens all the time with certain sites now and ocassionally with others. Haven't found a solution or anyone else speaking of this problem. Now and then I'm also noticing I save a page to my favorites and it will save the title as the URL like mentioned above, but will include the correct URL target, all in a single file.

Is something corrupt? I'm using IE8 (Vista x64, SP1) and it's been giving me more performance issues than usual, starting about the same time as this problem.

My IE starting doing this last week. I think it happened just after I named one of the URLs MouseOver which is a JavaScript keyword as well as in other languages.

Welcome
I do not think it is the name try these steps:

Try a new browswer, Firfox and Chrome are nice

Try to go to tools
internet options
advanced
reset

Try
A system restore from before the problem

Finally, do you have too many favorites?

It's possible that your Favorite folders (including subfolders) have lost lost their system attribute, and thus may not be appearing correctly.

Try resetting the system attribute from the cmd window using the following command (make sure the path is correct for your machine). ATTRIB -S C:\Documents and Settings\username\Favorites /S /D

Hey jasonieteam!

I think you hit upon the true resolution!

To make sure I wasn't hallucinating about the original problem of dual links, I visited a page and added the Favorite. It split into two valid links.
Next I went to a subfolder and saved the favorite again, this time giving it my custom name. It split into one valid link with the verbose URL and one invalid link with my custom name.
Then I did your attrib thing from the cmd DOS command line. At first it didn't work, so I looked up the attrib command for Vista. The format in Vista should be:

attrib +s C:\Users\username\Favorites /s /d

Then I went back to the site and did some saving of Favorites and it seems to be fixed!

I think when I copied/merged another Favorites folder onto my current Favorites, the SYSTEM attribute must have gotten un-set. I could test this I suppose, but I'm too lazy right now.

Thank you for finally replying to this problem! I was afraid there was no hope left

I do have a large volume of favourites... but every two months or so go through them all and delete the ones I no longer need and save the ones I do, although they go in separate folders organized by the date I went through and saved them, so the list itself never gets more than 200 favourites, hence figuring it wasn't related to a massive list of favourites.

So, I used the command "ATTRIB -S C:\Users\username\Favorites /S /D" (for Vista) and only after closing IE and ending all related processes, it started to save favourites correctly. I'll wait and see how it goes, but the main site that never, ever saved correctly... is currently saving in my list as normal.

Thanks!!

Glad to hear that your favorites are working as they should!

Quite sadly to say, the solution presented turned out in the end not to work at all. This problem has been escaping solution for quite a while and I've done some searching on the Internet and found many other people with this problem. One even called Microsoft and the problem simply could not be resolved.

Mine started back up the next time I restarted my computer. Resetting the attributes did absolutely nothing the second time. Since then, the problems with IE progressed even further. My IE stopped logging its browsing history entirely a few days ago and almost every page I added to my favorites list began flat out not saving any targets at all, then I'd get a few that would work fine. No patterns whatsoever here.

I've tried the following actions in an attempt to resolve this:

-Disable my antivirus program (currently using AVG 2011) - no luck
-Delete all favorites, browsing history, etc. -- this solved the browsing history problem (at the cost of losing 17 weeks of history)
-Reset IE settings / disable all add-ons - uh, no...
-Uninstall IE8, in which it reverts back to Vista-installed IE7 - problem continued in IE7 as well
-Reinstall IE8
-Uninstall some recent Windows Updates
-Attempt to do a system restore point... but it's started saving them only 5 days in the past now (:sa ... and this problem dates much further back - took a few weeks to even realize it was doing this

While I haven't encountered the split-in-two favorites links since all this, I am experiencing a page that has a valid title but is saving the link as "http-www.__.com" *with*a valid target... both on my system as well as my mother's, which is XP. Can't figure this out... but interestingly, with IE7, this page would NOT load and always would come up with the favorites icon showing in the address bar, but the page itself would be totally blank. I could go into the IE security settings, make no actual changes to it, but hit "Apply"... then refresh and it would load perfectly normal. Had to go through that EVERY time I restarted IE to see this page. In IE8, it's just fine. Either way, dragging the link from the IE address bar to the desktop does NOT result in ANY of these problems (furthermore, opening the Favorites folder in Windows Explorer and dragging it into the folder also works perfectly fine)... only when adding to the Favorites folder via the IE "add to favorites" button causes problems.

I'm guessing it's a matter of time before I come across the split-into-two files again.

None of this is happening with Firefox, naturally. It's entirely an IE issue.

Next step will be uninstalling updates back to early November, when this started. One big installation was a major update to AVG... and I'm starting to wonder if this issue has roots in security settings somewhere along the way.

Again, I'll wait and see, test out some saving of links, and report back. By the looks of the other posts on this issue, I'm sure some lurkers will read and want working solutions.

EDIT: It appears that the one page/site in question that is still saving the Favorites title incorrectly (yet no problems with the URL target like before) has a page title that exceeds 140 characters, sometimes as many as 180. I created my own webpage with the exact same name and it saved it exactly the same way -- as http--www.__ instead of the title. I shortened the name of the page title on the test page, and it worked properly. This doesn't explain the other ones that were saving incorrectly, but I have yet to come across this problem yet since re-installing.

EDIT 2: Nah, still doing it in full force. Even saving this page in my favorites comes up as two separate files (both with the correct URL target though)

To make this post's "solved" status worthy of its title, I have found the true solution to this problem after 10 hours of working on it and experimenting; this solution thanks to Microsoft.

See the Microsoft post: IE8 Favorites do not work

Using the "Aggressive" mode in Microsoft Fix It fixes this problem, whether it be a .dll file, the registry or whatever. Running "default" mode alone will not solve it.

Everyone taking part in that post had installed AVG 2011, including myself (and multiple others with this problem who posted in different posts on the Microsoft sites). Simply uninstalling AVG does not solve the problem, but Fix It did.

Shame on AVG for yet another major bug in a finished product!!

To be sure it worked, I went through the Internet and saved 50 URLs into my favorites list, and every one of them saved perfectly.

Hope this helps someone else in the future, because for people such as myself who browse through over 500 pages per week and save a lot of them, this is a frustrating problem to have...

A solved problem