Ishida Tech Solutions, Ltd.
The personal and professional home of Brad Ishida

If you’re having the same problem I was, this is your lucky day because this solution is nowhere to be found as far as I can tell.

I recently had the following symptoms on a Windows XP box with multiple users.

1) The desktop icons for files would not appear for new files without manually refreshing the desktop by pressing F5 or by selecting “refresh” from the right-click menu.

2) When saving files from a web browser, the files don’t appear on the desktop without a manual refresh.

3) When moving files from the desktop to the recycle bin, the file icon remains on the desktop until there is a manual refresh.

4) The problem only occurred for one user and not everyone with an account.

The solution:

The registry value for the desktop for this user was incorrect. The value contained the variable %ALLUSERSPROFILE% instead of the correct variable %USERPROFILE%. I changed this value to %USERPROFILE%\Desktop

1) start->run->regedit

2) Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders and check the value for Desktop. If it looks wrong, you can fix it and this will most likely fix your desktop refresh problem.

I recently formatted some external drives in Vista and then moved them to an XP machine where they would not mount. When I went to reformat them in XP, I found that I could not format the disks at all. The disk management tool (control panel->administrative tools->computer management->disk management) listed them as “GPT protected” and would not allow me to erase them.

The solution was to use the command line tool “diskpart” to clean the disk so it could be formatted like normal in XP.

1) start->run->cmd

2) diskpart

3) list disk

4) select disk # (select disk 4 for example)

5) clean

6) exit

Now the disk will be available to format using the Disk Management tool.