stuartandnicola.com

I've come across two variants of this. The first is when the personalised folders stop working (e.g. Stuart's Music insists on displaying as My Music). The second is when 'special' folders refuse to show their proper name, e.g. I've had Shared Documents become My Documents and refuse to change back.

Corrupt or missing desktop.ini

First a bit of background. The special folder status works using a little hidden system file called desktop.ini. That file lives in the folder in question and tells Windows what's special about the folder. If this file goes missing or gets corrupted then the folder misbehaves.

Each desktop.ini has basically the same structure so it's fairly easy to fix. If the file has got deleted then you can either create a new one by hand, or copy it from an existing folder and then edit it.

To display the desktop.ini you have to make it visible by opening the folder in question and click Tools > Folder Options... and then selecting View. Then select Show hidden files and folders and uncheck Hide protected operating system files (Recommended). You'll get a warning when you do the second step but just say Yes.

When you click on OK the desktop.ini file should appear ready for you to fix.
Because this is a hidden file it will appear slightly pale, and it should have an icon of a notepad with a gear on it, indicating that it's a configuration file.
Depending on what "special" folder you want you need to type different text in the file.

Copy and paste the chunk you need from the list below. Where the line says Owner=<ownername> you should type your name in place of <ownername>.

I found this solution originally on this site, and this is my write up of it!

The [.ShellClassInfo] tells Windows where to find the appropriate description and is a pointer in to the registry. That's how they make Windows work in different languages. The section beneath [DeleteOnCopy] tells Windows that if the special folder is copied it should remove this section. So if you copy "My Pictures" to another location the personalisation gets removed. I accidentally did this when I backed up everything to a hard disk by copying the folders over!

When you're done don't forget to hide the desktop.ini files again by reversing the Tools > Folder Options... step!

Special folder still won't behave

This seems to be a fairly obscure problem - I only ever had it happen once and it had me stumped for ages. I struggled to find anything on the web, but eventually located the answer hidden in the Microsoft Knowledgebase KB326459.

The desktop.ini file tells Windows what to do with a special folder, but there's a trick... Windows only goes looking for desktop.ini if the folder is marked as read-only.

If the read-only setting gets turned off then Windows doesn't even check to see if desktop.ini exists! I guess Microsoft are using this is a shortcut to say "there's something special about this folder, look for desktop.ini". The read-only setting has no effect on whether the contents of the folder are read-only or not.

What happened to me is that Shared Documents became My Documents even though it had the correct desktop.ini in it!

You can't access the read-only property of a folder from the Windows desktop, you have to go via the command line. So, if this happens to you start a command prompt (Start > All Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt) and change to the parent of the folder in question. Then enter the command

Where <foldername> is the name of the problem folder. This restores the hidden setting. Exit the command prompt, log off and back on and the problem should be fixed!

You might find these Microsoft Knowledgebase items helpful too:

How to modify your folder view settings or to customize a folder (KB812003)

Your view settings or customizations for a folder are lost or incorrect (KB813711).