On Thu, 18 Jan 2018 00:11:56 +0000, Dick Baker wrote:

Win7 64-bit Home Edition.

I just discovered that my backup utility, FarStone Total Recovery, has
been failing to back up my MSIE Favorites folder,
C:\Users\DB7\Favorites.
I poked around in TR and found that when it looks there, it finds a
folder named Favorites 160822. Windows Explorer shows it as simply
Favorites, so I thought TR was nuts.

But when I opened a command prompt and did a directory listing for C:
\Users\DB7, it too reported that the folder was Favorites 160822. And
when I copy that directory to another drive, it shows up there as
Favorites 160822.

I tried deleting that folder and creating a new Favorites, but when I
ran MSIE, it promptly created Favorites 160822 right alongside my
Favorites, and flagged that version as the "real" Favorites directory
with its little star icon.

Thinking that something in the Registry was telling Win7/MSIE 11 to
behave this way, I searched it for the string "Favorites 160822," but no
hits.

So I uninstalled MSIE 11 and 10 (which I was surprised to find still
there) and reinstalled a fresh copy of 11...which then promptly
recreated Favorites 160822.

At this point, I'm out of ideas. Anybody got another one?

Mayana was right in that the desktop.ini file is what was fooling WinExp.
When I deleted that file, WinExp reported the folder by it's *real* name
of Favorites 160822.

But Paul's hint was the solution. He wrote:
https://www.howtogeek.com/115412/cha...on-for-saving-
internet-explorer-favorites/

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curre ntVersion\Explorer\
User Shell Folders\Favorites

Apparently that links to the real storage location for that folder.

And it did: The registry entry read "%USERPROFILE%\Favorites 160822"

I changed that to simply "Favorites"; then the next time I ran MSIE it
created a new Favorites folder alongside the Favorites 160822 folder, and
the new one had the star indicating it was the true one. I copied all the
links from the old bad one to the new good one and now all is well.

BUT one puzzle remains. As I said in my original note, one of my first
troubleshooting steps was to search the registry for "Favorites 160822",
but I got no hits. When I followed Paul's instructions and found that it
really was there, but before changing it, I did another search through the
registry looking for "Favorites 160822" and *again* it failed to find such
a string. How could that be?

--
--------------------------------------------
Dick Baker
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