Indiscriminate Transgressions

I had to rebuild the OS on my laptop, so I started from scratch with Vista x64 Ultimate. All went well during the install, and updates were installed. No crashes, no problems.

When I started using the system, I noticed some differences from the other installs. I first noticed when adding the debugging symbols to Visual Studio. When I browse folder, this is what happens:

The User profile folder, which is my case is supposed to be my username, “kk” ( and is on my desktop), instead is empty. When I click on it, I get the error “The folder cannot be used.” If you look at the image, there’s an extra space in there, it’s like the folder name being retrieved by the system is null.

Visual studio recovers from this and I can browse for the folder. Apple’s iTunes, however, fails. I keep my music on an external hard drive, but when I click on “browse…” to point my music folder there, I get the same error as above, but iTunes becomes unusable after I clear the dialog. Which sucks because iTunes also base64 encodes their preferences xml files rather than just writing them out as UTF-16 encoded, but I won’t pick on Apple too much since I am a shareholder. Oh wait, yes I will, what the hell kind of boneheaded decision was that?

In Internet Explorer, you can relocate your folder for cache. Here is what comes up on a properly working system:

And here is what happens on my system:

Note the lack of the User Profile folder in this dialog. So IE wins on the “smartness” of dealing with this issue, but it’s still an issue. On a system where this works properly, you can also browse “up” in certain dialogs to the top, which brings you to that User Profile, I get the same error in that case as well.

Some things I’ve done to try to fix this:

• I tried searching through the Microsoft knowledge base, and I find many articles about “special folders” like Music and Pictures not having the correct icons, but nothing like this.
• I spend about an hour with procmon watching what kind of registry access is made on the system to see if it’s some kind of problem there. That was so painful — when you open a browse dialog there’s a massive flurry of activity and nothing jumps out as a problem.
• I’ve compared permissions, etc, on a working system with this system, identical.
• I decided to create a new account on the machine, all new accounts being created have exactly the same problem.

It’s weird how crippling this is, it’s minor issue but it comes up a lot and it makes it hard to browse for files in general. If anyone has experienced this problem, please share your findings.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 11:40 am and is filed under Computers Suck, Microsoft, Vista, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.