stuartandnicola.com

I wanted to burn a quick CD yesterday and I discovered the Send To CD Drive shortcut was missing. Then I noticed the Copy to CD option in my Picture Tasks was also missing! The drive properties were fine - Windows knew the drive was a writer! Nero was still ok - it knew that my drive was a CD writer, and I could create a CD from there, so the underlying hardware was fine. I also knew my other PC was fine, so whatever was wrong was specific to one computer.

I know people say that the burn system in XP isn't as good as, say, Nero, but for a quick and dirty job it's fast and effective, so I wanted it back.

I've managed to fix it, and if you are suffering the same problem (read on to double check your symptoms are the same!) then you can download a registry patch (attached to this post) that will reinstate a few missing registry keys.

I'm not sure why these keys had got deleted. They are still present on my other PC, which is how I extracted them. I did some housekeeping the other day and removed a couple of programs. I can only assume that one of the uninstallers was a little too enthusiastic and also removed these keys!

So what did I discover...

I started my usual research at Google and at first it looked promising. Lots of references to the Send To link going astray. However, on deeper reading it turned out these were nearly all attributed to Windows not recognising a drive as a CD burner. This was generally due to:

• The drive not being recognised as a burner at all, in which case the Recording tab of the drive properties doesn't appear;
• The drive being recognised as a burner, but the writing capability being switched off, in which case the Recording tab is there, but the option to enable writing is unchecked;
• The drivers getting corrupted, with various references to registry entries and Upperfilters and Lowerfilters settings getting corrupted.

My problem was that the drive was being recognised, the Recording tab was there, it was enabled, and if I right-clicked on the drive the option to Write these files to CD was even there!

That suggested to me that the problem must lie somewhere else. I tried the suggested fix of removing Nero and re-installing it, but that didn't help. I went rooting around for these mysterious filter settings, but they weren't there. I tried uninstalling my CD drives and then adding them back in. Nope.

Not one to give up easily I kept plugging away. I realised that the problem might lie somewhere in the registry. I don't know a massive amount about the internal workings of Windows, but I do know that the registry is responsible for shell extensions, and that the Send To item pops up on a shortcut menu and might therefore be in registry somewhere.

My initial searches were pretty fruitless and I didn't come up with anything useful. I was cross checking between my two PCs and everything I looked at seemed the same on both.

I had nearly given up when I found an article that include a dump from a Hijack This log. In this log was a reference to an item that triggers on start up - a reference to Windows CLSID key going by the title of CDBurn with GUID {fbeb8a05-beee-4442-804e-409d6c4515e9}.

"Oh well," thinks me. "Maybe that key will give me a clue as to where else CDBurn is mentioned, and maybe I'll be able to back track or find some differences between the two computers."

A quick search through the registry for that key, and straight I way I discovered that on the machine that had lost its tasks this key didn't appear in the same places as on the machine that was still ok.

So, I exported the two keys from the working machine and loaded them in to the broken one. I happened to have a picture folder open, and as soon as the key loaded Copy to CD re-appeared on the task panel! The Send To shortcut is back - everything as it should be!

The missing keys are:

1. HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{fbeb8a05-beee-4442-804e-409d6c4515e9}
2. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID\{fbeb8a05-beee-4442-804e-409d6c4515e9}

There are a few sub-keys underneath these, so the easiest thing to do was to extract the keys from my working machine. I've attached a registry key file here for future reference for me, but feel free to download if you think it might help. Once you've downloaded the file then open it to get Windows to import it to your registry (Usual disclaimers: Download at your own risk, I'm not responsible for any problems, Always remember to back up your registry first before altering it, etc, etc!)

So I don't know why these keys were AWOL, but I can rest in peace now I have them back! It wasn't actually that critical to fix, but it wasn't right, and I don't like things that aren't right!

If you've stumbled on this article and it helps you out then it was all worth while! If this page doesn't solve your problem then you might to try the Microsoft KB article 324129.