Offline files - "Make available offline" is checked and greyed out!

[Peter]

Hi,
I am running Windows XP Pro, and have all the latest patches applied.

There are some network shares (one on Win NT 4.0 server, one on Windows 2000
professional) that are set to be offline folders for my computer.

There are 10,000 odd files in these directories.
I don't require either of these directories to be available offline.
But I can not figure out how to turn them off.

If I browse to the directories in explorer (using unc), I can see that the
folder icons are marked as offline.
If I right click on the folder, I can see that "Make available offline" is
checked.
But it is also greyed out, and does not allow me to uncheck it.
I have tried going to the parent folder, seting this to available offline
(including sub-folders), and then unchecking "Make available offline" at
this parent folder level (including sub-folders). This stopped the parent
folder from being available offline, but did not fix the child folders.

These are still available offline, and the "Make available offline" menu
item is still greyed out.

I have turned off any synchronization (schedule, on idle, log-on/log-off)
off for these shares, but I still get annoying bubble messages pop up when
ever either of these computers is not on the LAN (regularly).

Is there a way to remove these "offline folders"? (Registry hack?
Utilities?)

Cheers,
Peter

[Alastair Smith]

Hi,

not sure if you've sorted this one by now but I've had this a few
times, easiest thing to do is to delete all offline files, disconnect
the logical drive within 'My Computer', when you reconnect the drive
it should have lost the settings for synchronising this drive. If you
have individual folders that are trying to synchronise moving the
folder into a different path will sort this one out.

Good luck

Alastair


"Peter" > wrote in message >...
> Hi,
> I am running Windows XP Pro, and have all the latest patches applied.
>
> There are some network shares (one on Win NT 4.0 server, one on Windows 2000
> professional) that are set to be offline folders for my computer.
>
> There are 10,000 odd files in these directories.
> I don't require either of these directories to be available offline.
> But I can not figure out how to turn them off.
>
> If I browse to the directories in explorer (using unc), I can see that the
> folder icons are marked as offline.
> If I right click on the folder, I can see that "Make available offline" is
> checked.
> But it is also greyed out, and does not allow me to uncheck it.
> I have tried going to the parent folder, seting this to available offline
> (including sub-folders), and then unchecking "Make available offline" at
> this parent folder level (including sub-folders). This stopped the parent
> folder from being available offline, but did not fix the child folders.
>
> These are still available offline, and the "Make available offline" menu
> item is still greyed out.
>
> I have turned off any synchronization (schedule, on idle, log-on/log-off)
> off for these shares, but I still get annoying bubble messages pop up when
> ever either of these computers is not on the LAN (regularly).
>
> Is there a way to remove these "offline folders"? (Registry hack?
> Utilities?)
>
> Cheers,
> Peter

[Peter]

Hi Alastair,
Thanks for the input.
I aren't using logical drives, but your advice led me in the right
direction.

I think I found the cause of the greyed out / checked offline directory.
I had redirected the "My Pictures" to this directory. I had been using a
graphics program to manipulate bitmaps for a project. The program always
opened in the "My Pictures" directory, so I changed this to make it open in
the directory that I was regularly working in!

So, I went through these steps to fix the problem:
1) Deleted all offline files (temporary and non-temporary whatever this
distinction is)
2) Turned off Offline files
3) Changed "My Pictures" to point to a path on C:
4) Rebooted
5) Re-enabled offline files and set up the two folders I wanted to share
again
(I didn't use this exact set of steps - but I think this would have been the
shortest successful path.)

Everything is working fine now - no extraneous offline folders.

Still, it would be nice if future versions of Windows, or maybe TweakUI, had
a feature for managing offline folders.
I've seen problems with offline folders on a W2K computer also - although I
think this was due to share names changing on the server.

Cheers,
Peter

"Alastair Smith" > wrote in message
om...
> Hi,
>
> not sure if you've sorted this one by now but I've had this a few
> times, easiest thing to do is to delete all offline files, disconnect
> the logical drive within 'My Computer', when you reconnect the drive
> it should have lost the settings for synchronising this drive. If you
> have individual folders that are trying to synchronise moving the
> folder into a different path will sort this one out.
>
> Good luck
>
> Alastair
>
>
> "Peter" > wrote in message
>...
> > Hi,
> > I am running Windows XP Pro, and have all the latest patches applied.
> >
> > There are some network shares (one on Win NT 4.0 server, one on Windows
2000
> > professional) that are set to be offline folders for my computer.
> >
> > There are 10,000 odd files in these directories.
> > I don't require either of these directories to be available offline.
> > But I can not figure out how to turn them off.
> >
> > If I browse to the directories in explorer (using unc), I can see that
the
> > folder icons are marked as offline.
> > If I right click on the folder, I can see that "Make available offline"
is
> > checked.
> > But it is also greyed out, and does not allow me to uncheck it.
> > I have tried going to the parent folder, seting this to available
offline
> > (including sub-folders), and then unchecking "Make available offline" at
> > this parent folder level (including sub-folders). This stopped the
parent
> > folder from being available offline, but did not fix the child folders.
> >
> > These are still available offline, and the "Make available offline" menu
> > item is still greyed out.
> >
> > I have turned off any synchronization (schedule, on idle,
log-on/log-off)
> > off for these shares, but I still get annoying bubble messages pop up
when
> > ever either of these computers is not on the LAN (regularly).
> >
> > Is there a way to remove these "offline folders"? (Registry hack?
> > Utilities?)
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Peter