Win 7 Renames my System Folders

Greetings - first post here...

For years I have been using my own naming convention for my data files - I never use Windows' "My Documents", "My Pictures" etc. folders for my files. I keep them on a separate drive from the system (ie: D:\Data, D:\Data\Images, etc.). for years now (since XP), I have been re-directing my system folders to these folders on the secondary drive. This worked well with XP, Vista, and Win 7.

About a week ago I did a Windows Update. I only installed Win 7 a couple of months ago, and this was my first update. There were about 150 updates waiting for me, and I installed most of them. Since then, Windows has renamed all of my system folders on the D: drive to their "My Documents", "My Pictures" convention. I can go into each of my user accounts and rename them back to their original names, but the next time I reboot they are all renamed again to the Windows' convention. If I click in the address bar of the folder to see their "real" names, they still have the names I originally gave them (D:\Data, etc.), so the change seems to be cosmetic in nature. I have a triple-boot system with XP, Vista and Win7, and when I boot into Vista, the names are changed to the Vista convention ("Documents", "Pictures", etc.). Not sure how that happened

I absolutely LOATHE the childish "My Computer" "My Documents" "My Network Neighborhood" fad that MS started back in the Win 95 days. Does anyone know how to keep windows from renaming my system folders? If I could identify the particular update that caused this I would gladly remove it, but as I said before, there are over 100 updates to go through, so trial and error isn't practical.

Thanks,

joe

Thanks for the quick replies!

After starting this thread I looked at the Similar Threads list below and found this one:
Moving my documents renames target folder itself!

Even though I hadn't moved the folders (they already existed), I thought I would try that solution, and it worked! I simply removed the desktop.ini file from each offending folder, and my folders reverted back to their original names. I've rebooted a couple of times, and the issue hasn't re-appeared :)

While I'm at it, though, I have my start menu links set to show as menus, and when I hover over, say, the Documents link, instead of going straight to the folders/files under D:\Data, it first shows "Data" and I have to hover over that folder to see the folders within the Data folder. By default, it used to show both "Data" and "Public Documents", but I removed "Public Documents" from the list (did the same with Pictures, Music, and Videos). Is there any way to remove that extra step, and go straight to the folders in the My Documents ("Data") folder when hovering over the Documents link in the start menu? Knit picky, I know, but if it can be done... :)

If this question should be in another thread, I apologize..

The folders were redirected already - just wanted to keep Windows from renaming the folders. Actually, it appears the folders were not really being renamed, windows was just "calling" the folders "My Documents", etc. because of the info in the desktop.ini file. Deleting that file resolved my original problem.

But as for the Show As Link question, setting the Show As Links in the start menu would defeat the purpose of my setting them to Show As Menu - I like to drill down in the folder hierarchy by hovering the mouse over the folders until I reach the level I need, instead of opening the documents folder, then double-clicking the music folder, then double-clicking the Led Zeppelin folder, and so on and so on. It's just quicker for me, to use the Show As Menu setting. The question I mentioned at the last of the previous post is unrelated to the thread starter (probably should have started a new thread to avoid confusion). I was just complaining about the fact that when you mouse over the "Documents" link in the start menu, instead of displaying the contents of the Documents folder, it displays the link to the documents folder, then I have to mouse over that link to see the contents. Not really a big problem, but thought I'd ask...