James' Documents / My documents / User Documents filling up hard drive :-(

[james]

I've been using XP for a couple years so I'm not exactally new.
However I discovered my hard Drive filling up and discovered I have
two folders (James' Documents and User Documents), which have the
same files as "My Documents". The files seem to be copied and not
just shortcuts. So they seem to be taking up three times the space.

I did an experiment where I created a file in "my documents", and it
appeared in the other two folders as well. Then I deleted it in the
"James' Documents", and it automatically deleted in my documents.

Since I do backups to another drive I don't need this redundancy, yet
I'd still like to be able to access the two drives over my network
from the other computer.

Am I asking too much? If I want the shared capability over the
network, must I have the second and third copy of the files. I
suppose I could just move the files to a folder on C-Drive and call it
"Stuff" and have "My Documents" empty.

Can anyone tell me if they have found a solution to this?
The Microsoft Knowlege Base was no help to me at all.

Thanks,
James Harris

[Peter Hutchison]

On Thu, 08 May 2003 00:43:12 -0400, james >
wrote:

>I've been using XP for a couple years so I'm not exactally new.
>However I discovered my hard Drive filling up and discovered I have
>two folders (James' Documents and User Documents), which have the
>same files as "My Documents". The files seem to be copied and not
>just shortcuts. So they seem to be taking up three times the space.
>
>I did an experiment where I created a file in "my documents", and it
>appeared in the other two folders as well. Then I deleted it in the
>"James' Documents", and it automatically deleted in my documents.
>
>Since I do backups to another drive I don't need this redundancy, yet
>I'd still like to be able to access the two drives over my network
>from the other computer.
>
>Am I asking too much? If I want the shared capability over the
>network, must I have the second and third copy of the files. I
>suppose I could just move the files to a folder on C-Drive and call it
>"Stuff" and have "My Documents" empty.
>
Your files are NOT duplicated, My Documents, James Documents and User
Documents are actually different names for the SAME folder. Hence why
files are created/deleted on one do the same in the other.

Peter Hutchison
Windows FAQ
http://www.pcguru.plus.com/winfaqs.html