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Windows Explorer Acting Very Weird

racketboy - Feb 26, 2004

		racketboy		Feb 26, 2004
			My biggest annoyance currently is that certain folders in Explorer don't always stay sorted correctly. I usually have stuff sorted by "type" but sometimes it spontaneously puts files and folders in random order. totally random. It normally happens right after I copy files to that directory or change file names or something. I hit F5 to refresh and sometimes it puts them back. Then it will do it again later. It started happening after I tried running this old DOS program that I thought my wife might like for her students. Anyway, it seems like that messed something up. I ran virus scan, spyware scan, Windows Update, restored default settings in Explorer -- nothing seemed to help. Any ideas? I'm running XP Pro, BTW

		racketboy		Mar 1, 2004
			no ideas?

		it290		Mar 1, 2004
			You already reset all the folders to defaults, it sounds like? Hmm.. what was the program that you think caused this strange behavior?

		racketboy		Mar 3, 2004
			I was this old music game that ran in DOS that I got from The Underdogs. The reason I thought of it is after I ran it, it changed the date in Windows to something like the year 5314. That made WMP crash (took me a little while to figure out what happened).

		it290		Mar 3, 2004
			Hmm, freaky. It probably just changed the hardware clock though... probably wouldn't effect sorting by name, type, etc. (or date - it didn't change the timestamp on your files, I assume?).. Perhaps by setting the date so radically far in the future, it caused some obscure bug to occur in explorer, but I kind of doubt that as well... perhaps there's a different reason for the strange behavior. I'm baffled, but it's intriguing, regardless.

		Taelon		Mar 3, 2004
			That gives me an idea... When you run Scandskw (the Windows GUI version of Scandisk), it gives you an option to repair invalid time/date stamps found on any files. Or at least view which ones are invalid, don't exactly remember right now (as I've used XP for a long time now). Anyway, the thing is that Windows will consider all dates/times that are in the future (relative to current system time) to be invalid. it290 could be right, and this will get Explorer to behave normally again, once fixed.