Favorites Empty in Navigation Pane - Fix

thanks for getting back so quickly Brink
there's nothing between Favorites and My Documents under my username, not even a grayed out box, and all my folder views are set to display hidden files (and do)
I copied the key name and pasted into regedit's find box and it found nothing

Brilliant. Got all the defaults back in Favorites now. Thanks a bunch Brink.

I followed the 2 steps and it did not work, so I created a folder named

"my links"

in

C:\users\(my-user-name)\

and it became automatically a folder called "Links" with the special icon with a blue arrow, and now it works. The only difference is that now the links have at the end the legend "(NAME)-shortcut", but it works the same.

I am not sure if this would have worked alone or if I actually needed to add the .reg files, but it only started working when I did this.

Thank you very much!!!

Hi everyone

I had the same problem for several days and none of the above worked for me and after a lot of googling I got very frustrated not to find anywhere with a solution. So I had to find the answer for myself.

The reason my Windows Explorer Favorites went blank and unresponsive was that I had inadvertently moved my user “Links” (C:\Users\”Username” \Links) folder to a remote inaccessible location such as an external drive (or in your case could have been a Network or a Flash drive etc.) and that location had been engraved in the registry hence the registry was looking at the wrong place for it each time. It took some time to work out where in registry I had to make the correction. The following is for Win7 Professional but for other OS it may be similar:

1) Delete all occurrences of the subfolder “Links” in the user folder of the user with the problem (i.e. under the path C:\Users\”Username”).

2) Run RegEdit as administrator. Export the whole Registry into a .reg file just in case you make any errors.

3) Go to Reg entry: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders. In the RH pane look for the string with a path ending with “Links” and correct it to: C:\Users\”Username”\Links where “Username” is the actual name of the user account with the problem.

4) Go to Reg entry: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders. Again in the RH pane look for the string with a path ending with “Links” and correct it to: %USERPROFILE%\Links.

5) Go to Reg entry: HKEY_USERS\xyzxyzxyzxyzxyzxyzxyzxyzxyzxyzxyzxyzxyzxxyzx\Software\Microsoft\
Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders. Where the xyz are any sequence of numbers and characters that may be your specific case. Again in the RH pane look for the string with a path ending with “Links” and correct it to: C:\Users\”Username”\Links.

6) Go to Reg entry: HKEY_USERS\xyzxyzxyzxyzxyzxyzxyzxyzxyzxyzxyzxyzxyzxxyzx\Software\Microsoft\
Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders. Again in the RH pane look for the string with a path ending with “Links” and correct it to: %USERPROFILE%\Links.

7) Exit the RegEdit. Make a new “Links” folder under the path C:\Users\”Username”\. Close all and reboot you PC.

If this works for you Happy Computing! and please say thanks.

Hi Brink

Thanks for your reply. It may be useful to know. The problem though was not "changing folder default locations", it was why "Win Expl Favorites" was DEAD. And after dozens of unsolved open threads about this problem, some in this very site dating back to 3 years or more, suddenly you have realised that it was related to "Folder Default Location". The solution to a hard problem always sounds easy after someone else comes up with it and many suggest different versions of getting the same solution.