New
#1
Windows Explorer Library Refuses to include My Documents
I have 4 computers all running W7 Home Premium, all set up identically. One has recently lost track of My Documents in the Windows Explorer Library and doesn't offer a solution to restoring it.
The actual content of My Documents is on a DNS-323 network drive. In years of experience, nothing like this has been a problem, so nothing to see there.
The Library shows Documents with the "expansion arrow". If I try to expand that, the arrow goes away but nothing happens. If I click on Documents, I get the messages "Documents is Empty" "No folders have been include in the library". If I click on the Include a folder button, navigate to the folder on the network drive and try to add it, I get a message "This network location can't be included because it is not indexed". The other three computers are pretty sure it is, or at least that it doesn't matter.
I have searched through the Registry for a clue, but there are so many references to My Documents that I have no idea what to look for there.
I would appreciate any ideas other than reloading Windows. Is there a way to just reload Windows Explorer, or perhaps copy it from another of the working computers? (I suspect it is a Registry problem, so a simple copy is probably off the table.)
Some additional notes:
System Restore is not promising since I have no idea when it may have occurred and only two "critical updates". are listed as restore points for some reason. I know there have been others since I created several myself. But the space allocated for restore points is only at 2.5gB out of 10gB allocated so I don't understand that unless a Windows update deleted all previous restore points. Besides that, I am sure I have been chasing a solution since before the dates on those.
To make it worse, this is the computer my wife uses. She is an experienced user, but not a "computer-type". It is always possible that she did something to cause the problem, but I expect it is the result of a glitch of some sort, not a keyboard error. I want My Documents to appear as a library so she doesn't have to expand the view of the network drive with the risk that she might move or delete something there by accident.