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Yesterday I had a rather complicated technical problem to solve. Would post the whole story if it weren't so extensive...
Long story short, I repaired Windows XP using the original installation CD. I noticed that the position of nearly all files, inside the folders, were wrong or set on automatic sort by name.
To avoid confusion, what I mean by position is the (x,y)
coordinate where the file's icon exists, within a given folder, and not the actual physical location in the MBR.
I asked this question in chat and besides the former, someone suggested that the positions are stored in desktop.ini, which, AFAIK, is stored on a folder-by-folder basis.
It makes some sense that the repair process also restored the desktop.ini
files to their initial setting. However, after repairing the Windows installation, I restored C:\Windows
and C:\Documents and Settings
from another system (long story here).
As soon as I accessed the system, the file's positions were exactly the same as before... except, the C:\
, the C:\Program Files
and many other folders had their settings restored. What boggles me now is that I didn't restore C:\
, so a desktop.ini
file wouldn't be there.
As I also have a guest account activated, I noticed I viewed the positions in a different way that my main (admin) account.
The question here is Where does Windows store this attribute, for a specific folder?
My current hypothesis is that it is a a set of user definitions, stored somewhere on C:\Documents and Settings
, but on my searches I haven't found anything about user profiles and this attribute.
Note: As I was writing the question I replaced the word location to position in the post and I got some new information (some new question matches appeared) that might help anyone who tries to answer this:
- Where does Windows store icon positions?
- The accepted answer (and the question, albeit the title doesn't refer the desktop) refers a registry key, in HKCU, that controls the positions.
- Where is the Windows Registry Files stored?
individual users settings are located at %UserProfile%\Ntuser.dat
, which hints that HKCU keys are stored in there.
Thanks for the answer. In fact I did understand roughly the answer to the question as soon as I changed the title; however as at the time I was time-constrained, I wasn't able to write an answer. Plus, this way I opened a valid question someone somewhere might refer to. – Doktoro Reichard – 2013-10-27T17:44:02.863