• The Explorer status bar no longer displays how many bytes are free for floppy drives.
• File find is completely hosed - on purpose. (But it shows some of the desktop.ini files.)
• If your system has a zip-drive, your hard drive may be "e:" not "c:". For Microsoft's solution (a registry hack), see HOW TO: Change the System/Boot Drive Letter in Windows. This is potentially, the most dangerous registry hack I've seen. Be real sure to back up before trying this.
• The registry is much bigger than expected - about 17 meg. Most of it is in C:\WINDOWS\system32\config
• Symptom - double clicking a directory opens the search dialog box instead of showing the contents of the directory.

  XP changed the implementation of HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Shell. In Windows 98, if the default value of Shell was a null string, then the default option of HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\Shell was executed when you double clicked a directory. With XP, the default value of HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Shell should be any string except "find".

• I always edit html files using notepad. Some how the filename xp.htm (ie, this file) got changed to all caps (XP.HTM). I am sure that it wasn't created that way because
  • I paste the filename into all my html pages, and those were lower case
  • The name on the unix server was lower case (automatically created via ftp and case is always preserved)
• I modify the registry so that I can open a DOS shell (command window) by right clicking on a directory. Windows XP provides both cmd.exe and command.com ... be sure to only use cmd.exe, command.com does not work with paths that contain spaces!

  HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\DOSShell\command
    @ = C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe  /k cd "%1"
    

• My bugs page contains some of what is here.

• To change the Bubbly Start Button - right click on the desktop, select Properties. On the Appearance tab, change Windows XP style to Windows Classic style.

• I opened a cd in Windows Explorer - there were these extra headings. When sorting by name, the directories were sorted in with the files and there were headings for the letters of the alphabet.

  To fix this, right click in the white space to pop-up a menu, select Arrange Icons By, and turn off Show in Groups.

• By default, the taskbar stacks similar items into a menu. While this may reduce "clutter", in my opinion, it makes the taskbar useless. This feature is disabled by right clicking the taskbar, selecting properties, and unchecking Group similar taskbar buttons.

• Never use Search again, use Agent Ransack (free) instead - it even improves how the results are displayed.

  Find constrea.h on XP

  Explorer Search - 150 seconds
  Agent Ransack   -   7 seconds
  

  Find desktop.ini on XP

  Explorer Search - 131 files
  Agent Ransack   - 215 files
  

  This is unbelievable - don't waste your time with the XP search feature.

The trick was to remove the Guest account under Control Panel / Administrative Tools / Local Security Policy / Local Policies / User Rights Assignment / Deny access to this computer from the network. When this was done, all the other computers were able to see the shared drives.

I don't know why the Guest account was set, but the computer was worthless until this setting was removed. I assume that in a domain you will want to lock out Guest, but in a workgroup, you need to allow it.

These are other things I tried to "fix" the problem

• Adding individual shares to Control Panel / Administrative Tools / Local Security Policy / Local Policies / Security Options / Network access: Shares that can be accessed anonymously had no effect.
• Under each directory's Properties / Security tab, granting permissions to Anonymous logon and Everyone had no effect (since Everyone already had permission for the c-root Share Permissions).

To see the contents of the Program Files and Windows directories, add Everyone to their Properties / Security tabs.

Unfortunately, flash (USB) drives are a problem - when I shared one of these on a Windows XP Pro system, it could be seen on another Windows XP system ... but not on my Windows 95 or Windows 98 systems.

One system was running out of disk space, so I used Agent Ransack to look for large files. Among others, it found this

C:\Documents and Settings\a\Local Settings
    \Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\MQ29LLWA\AVSEQ02-1[1].wmv   80681 kbytes

Content.IE5

The solution - I have Explorer configured to allow me to click on any file and copy its path to the clipboard. I used that and pasted the path in the Windows Explorer address bar.

Wow ... a bunch of hidden files and directories are shown (7,500 files, about 128 MB worth).

Interestingly, 8,440 objects are shown in

C:\Documents and Settings\a\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files

I can see why Microsoft does not want you to see this stuff - it allows you to see ALL the crap downloaded with web pages (well, files anyway ... I don't see the cookies this way). You can even open (and copy) javascript (*.js) and style sheets (*.css) that web pages "include". (I have other tools that allow me to read those, so its not that big a deal.) This method also displays the normal Explorer right click menu, not the weak crap Explorer shows for Temporary Internet Files.

As to why one method shows almost 1,000 more objects than the other ... we've already established that Explorer is a lier. It appears that cookies are a part of the difference.

• When you click the headings to sort the file list, the sorted column is highlighted and there is an arrow to tell you which way the column is sorted. Unfortuantely, when you sort by date, with the most recent date on top, the directories are placed on the bottom.
• It "appears" that each user can have their own file associations, ie, .html could default to one application for one user, and another application for another user. (I have not figured out how to use this yet.)
• Each extension can now have its own Open With list. See

  HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts
  

• The way drive letters are assigned has changed. Now you can "mount" drives and directories any where you want. See

  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices
  

  On the down side, if your system has a zip-drive, your boot drive may be the e-drive. To "fix" it, see HOW TO: Change the System/Boot Drive Letter in Windows.
• The command prompt supports tab complete, just like linux. What this means is that if your are typing a long filename, you can type a few letters, press the tab key, and Windows XP will fill in the rest of the filename. If there are several possible matches, just press the tab key again to cycle through them.
• The search function now finds and displays some desktop.ini files. The one in c:\windows\fonts showed up, but the one in C:\WINDOWS\assembly (part of the .NET framework) did not.
• One problem that many people had was that they would accidentally move the taskbar and not know that they had done it or how to fix it. Use the Lock taskbar property to keep this from happening. (Either right click the taskbar, or right click the Start button, select properties, and check Lock taskbar to set this option.)

URL: http:// cpcug.org / user / clemenzi / technical / WinExplorer / xp.htm