a small windows mystery conquered: Why does my desktop show drive contents?
A small mystery I'm sharing that may save someone frustration in the future.
A discovery
I closed all the windows on my XP machine to discover this:
What's going on?
At first I thought I had mistakenly copied the contents of my C:\ drive onto the desktop. I've certainly done that on occasion.
But, a closer inspection revealed that Windows was truly showing the contents of the C:\ drive, these were not copies or shortcuts. If I deleted a file in the desktop it deleted it on the C:\ drive and vice-versa.
Some points
- I had no idea was possible. It's almost useful
- I have no idea how I entered this state.
- It scared me enough, that I wanted to go back to *normal*
What I did to solve the problem
Investigation with REGEDIT revealed that this registry key value:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders\Desktop
was set to
%SYSTEMDRIVE%
In my case %SYSTEMDRIVE% was the "C:\" drive. That explains the contents I saw on the desktop. I changed the value to
"%USERPROFILE%\Desktop"
and then logged out and back in.
Everything reverted to normal.
The search continues
I am investigating how this registry key was changed in the first place. Everything was fine just a day earlier.
