New
#1
Invisible files/folders -- what's Windows hiding?
Hello,
I recently had a problem where my jump lists stopped working. The solution I found on a blog site was to navigate to the folder c:\Users\username\Recent\automaticDestinations\ and delete the entire contents of this folder. What is funny about this folder, though, is that it's invisible in windows explorer. You would never even know that it's there---not even if you have "show hidden files," etc. turned on. You have to actually type this path into the location bar to view its contents.
After thinking about it for a while, I am sure I have encountered a similar thing at least once before, when I had to solve a ticket at work dealing with MS Outlook. I forget the details, but basically it was an invisible folder that you couldn't get to unless you knew it was there and manually typed it into the location bar.
This folder also will show up with a "dir" command from a command prompt. Looking at the attributes, it does not appear to be flagged as system or hidden. What is the mechanism at work here, then? Why wasn't it good enough to just flag the folder as hidden? Makes me wonder what other secrets are hiding deep in the jungle of the Windows 7 user profile, or in other places. And I would prefer to not have to "dir" my entire drive just to know that this stuff exists; I would much rather have it just show up in explorer, especially since I specifically turned off all the "hide stuff" options.
I spent at least an hour trying to dig up information on this, and can't find anything relevant. Maybe I'm just missing some specific keyword in google? Can anyone shed any light on this? Does anyone know of any other "secret" folders like this?
Thanks!