Windows 7: Mystery Drive (Q:)

After some more googling around im starting to see that this is something that office 2010 causes. no idea why or how to get rid of it yet. very strange.

Isn't that what smarteyeball was saying a few posts back?

Yep, that's what pointed me in the right direction. well at least now i know where it came from. Now how to get rid of it without uninstalling office. If anyone has anyone ideas on this let me know. ill keep hunting in the mean time. thx

My problem was most definetly caused by Office 2010. I wrote a reply earlier describing a fix I had used, but I guess it was deleted. Hopefully this one won't be deleted, as while my previous fix did get rid of the mystery drive, I still had issues related to locked registry keys causing installers to fail.

This is a link to "Microsoft fix it". Specifically, a link to the "Office 2010 uninstaller Tools".

And if your wondering, I've got Office 2007, and I didn't have to reinstall it after this fix.

Disk Q is installed during installation of Office 2007 or 2010. You can open it only through Office 2007 (10) application, ex. Outlook 2010 by trying to append a file to an e-mail. Outlook browser shows this drive as AppVirt (Q). Of course, it is stupid that Explorer shows this virtual drive but says "access denied". Would be nice, if Microsoft generates an update with a fix. Also, I noticed that Explorer does not anymore do an auto refresh. May be for the same reason: Office 2010 or 2007.

That Q is needed by Office leave it and forget it

Start with a system restore, just in case. This should fix refresh.
This should work
Click on Start at the lower left
Type the word regedit in the search box and hit enter
Right click HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT and click Find
Type dontrefresh in the search box and then hit enter
You will see DontRefresh, right click it to change the settings, set it to 0
Boot your computer. It should be set properly.
Be sure to make a system restore point first, to restore registry if necessary.

I have suggested this to other posters and got the response that they cannot get through the process, not true, works for me.

Try in an elevated command prompt if necessary
Elevated Command Prompt

Thank you very much. Now, explorer refresh works fine! I have some other strange stops in OS but need first to read more comments in this forum.

You are so very welcome. Stick around, enjoy, learn and teach. Glad that you are a member.

I'm still a little confused as to why you knew to do that richc46 . Are you saying that the 'Q' drive is needed by the Office 2010 Beta ? Just interested to find out, I am trying to establish a computer career.

Some programs, set up their own drive to perform certain actions. It is not only Word, there are other such programs, too.

The trick with the refresh, has nothing to do with the Q drive. Sometimes changes occurr in the registry, maybe because of corruption, installations etc. I just put the registry back the way it should be to refresh properly.