Vista - Personal User Shell Folders - Move Location

Ford GT,

Sounds good as long as they are separated.

Shawn

I'm posting this for posterity's sake:

Upon changing the Desktop shell folder to the root of a drive, some desktop related settings refuse to persist. This was never a problem with XP, which handled the drive root without incident. The issue persists no matter how the operation is preformed: according to this tutorial or just right-clicking shell folder. Here are the symptoms:

• Desktop icons always revert to "medium" size and float to the left of my desktop
• Pinned Start menu items added through Taskbar and Star Menu Properties > Customize... > Show on Start Menu disappear, and will not persist even after pressing "OK".

Service Pack 1 saw these issues non-persistent after rebooting during installation (i.e. the desktop had "large" icons and were in the top row, as I had left it, after rebooting). However, manual shut down since still demonstrates the issues.

I have made a workaround by turning off my desktop icons and making a toolbar at the bottom of my screen containing those folders:

However, after doing that, my toolbars and their icons refused to stay where I left them. Only after many, many reboots did things (slowly) start to stay where I left them, almost one-by-one. As of today, everything is where it should be, but if I tried to move anything it would revert to today's settings.

So if anyone tries moving their Desktop shell folder to a drive root and it's not to your satisfaction, you're not alone.

Brink,
I just realized that you had replied to my May post. I think it's a case of not fully understanding how Vista handles (or shows) the redirects. If I'm remembering correctly, when I named the new folder on the D: drive, that folder was the normal yellow folder icon. When I just created a new folder on D: and left it named new folder, it then displayed the appropriate green personal folder icon. But, the underlying name was still new1 or new2.

I like having the green personal folder icon displayed on D:, but I don't like having the underlying name be the undescriptive new1, etc. Am I misunderstanding how this works? Some days, Vista makes me feel like a total newbie.

Hi DonH,

Strange, it should change the name of the New Folder to the name of the user folder when you select the New folder and change the location of the user folder to it.

Try renaming the new folder to the same name as the use folder to see if that helps.

Shawn

Shawn,

It is strange. I can right click to change the name to Documents. It looks great in Windows Explorer. But, if I look at the properties of the junction, it shows the location as D:\New Folder. Pictures shows the location as D:\New Folder (3).

It is that underlying folder name that is passed to some programs. :-(

DonH,

It will keep the original name it took over as reference in Location. To have the name you want instead, restore the default location. When you create the New Folder, name it to Documents this time instead of leaving it as New Folder, then change the location to it. You will then have D:\Documents in Location.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Shawn,

Many thanks. It worked just as I thought it should when I first tried. I have no idea why I had so much trouble. Now, if I can just figure out what Vista Backup means by "Documents", I'll be all set! You'd think that somewhere that would be better defined. Documents as in the contents of the personal folder, Documents? Or documents as in those files with certain extensions? <grin>

Thanks again!
Don

Your welcome Don. I'm happy to hear that it us the way you wanted it now.

The backup files option for Documents is for all document type files on your computer, not just the ones in the Documents folder. The screenshot below step 6 of this tutorial will show you what you see for it.

Backup Files

Hope this helps,
Shawn

I hope that this is an appropriate place to ask this question. I work for a relatively small community college and we are trying to change a single lab over to Vista. (We are using Novell and not Active Directory) On XP, we currently use a simple registry change to redirect My Documents and Favorites over to a mapped network drive. I can see that this isn't as easy to do this with Vista. Right now I am looking at doing the redirection in the image with the Default user and such.

My Documents can be redirected just fine with Method 1 of your tutorial. The problem I am running in to though is that when I use method 1 in your tutorial, I can't get the favorites to show up in Internet Explorer 7. If I go to favorites in the User Folder list, I can see the favorites just fine and they are residing on the proper folder on the network. The location in the properties of the user folder favorites also shows the proper path. I have tried using both the mapped drive letter path to the proper folder as well as the UNC path. No matter what I try, the favorites never show in IE7 unless I move the favorites folder off of the network and back to the local machine. Is there anything I can do to make this work or will we just have to do without having the users favorites show up properly in Vista?

Hi Elangomatt,

I'm afraid that I do not know of a way to get Favorites to work in IE7 unless it is set at it's default location. I looked through the registry in the HKCU and HKLM locations for IE7, but I didn't see anything to specify a path for Favorites.

Sorry,
Shawn