Windows 7: Picture Library option not working on Desktop background

Hi, i had a slide show of my photos working nicely until yesterday. I think it stopped when i upgraded Adobe Flash - i have tried system restore but no joy there.



When i go to set "Picture Location" in "Choose your desktop background" i can't set the Picture Library setting. If i browse to one of my picture folders the box shows "This folder is empty".

I've tried quite a few things from the forum for similar sounding problems but have made no progress hope someone can help!

OK - i solved my own problem....

Indexing had been turned off - started it running again and problem solved.

Hoorah!

Nearly the same thing I experienced: after an Adobe Reader update and system restart, browsing to any folder in Picture Location will not select it - I'm stuck with the default folders in the dropdown box.

Originally posted here -> Cannot add Picture locations

If you create another user account it seems to work for that account. However, I just found out that it broke on that new account today (just under a week)! Wonder how they are saving those image locations, why can't it simply be a bunch of registry keys?

Dunno if this is part of the problem though: I remove all folders from any library and delete the junctions when creating a new account (I hate the library concept, I prefer to know where exactly a file is - folder hierarchies exist for a reason). I thought it shouldn't matter. Apps shouldn't be so crap as to break if they can't find the libraries or "default" folders anyway.

Edit: Indexing? That's... strange. I'll give it a try. I moved all my wallpapers to C:\pix and it seems that isn't included in the index.

Hope the indexing works for you Trucidation ! It's taken me a long time to a find a really simple solution, though i haven't worked out how indexing got turned off ...

Thanks, but adding C:\pix didn't work. My indexing was already on though, didn't seem like it got switched off.

It's a head scratcher. Picture Location lets you browse for additional folders... so why isn't it accepting any folders?

One other oddity. I downloaded a "Desktop changer" and THAT program somehow managed to get it's folder added to the dropdown box in Picture Location. There must be someplace where Windows 7 is storing these locations, the question is where?

Edit:
Okay, a workaround. Was poking around in the registry and noticed that there was one string in this key: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Wallpaper\KnownFolders\0\Windows Wallpapers\MergeFolders ...I know, suspicious, right? The previous 4 parent keys in the hierarchy all contain only a single empty REG_SZ value each. So I was thinking, what's the deal with this string, why is it named like a folder (C:\Windows\(something, sorry forgot what)). On a whim renamed the string to C:\pix and changed its value also to C:\pix.

Hey presto, when I went back to Personalization, selecting Windows Wallpapers from the dropdown menu took me to my wallpapers (C:\pix). Browsing for additional folders in Picture Location is still broken but at least now I can manually change where "Windows Wallpapers" in the dropdown is pointing to. It works, shuffle and everything.

This is enough of a solution for me, although it'd be nice if there was a real fix for the broken Picture Locations feature.