Win 7 Desktop does not auto-refresh

Anonymous
2009-11-04T03:31:49+00:00

Saw another thread on this, but no solution.  Two different laptops, both clean installs.  Intermittently, when I delete or move files on the desktop, the icon remains.  I have to manually refresh to clear the deleted/moved files.

Any ideas?

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Anonymous
2010-04-07T17:13:28+00:00

Yup, Deckard solved the problem. Here is his post from the other thread for quick reference. His solution worked for me:

"I've read this thread to the end and I've tried all the solutions posted... obviously to no avail.

The bug repeats itself, not randomly but constantly, in any situation, folders, libraries - sorted by name or by whatever.

I then tried something different, which instead WORKED , and here it is.

  1. I backed up the registry.
  2. Searched for occurrences of the word refresh and found this key: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID{BDEADE7F-C265-11D0-BCED-00A0C90AB50F}\Instance

which contains three subkeys. One of them, curiously enough, is DontRefresh and it has a value of 1 (turned ON)

  1. I then changed the value to 0 (turned OFF) and hit F5 to refresh and save the now changed registry.

Guess what? Now, everything (moving, deleting, copying) works and even the Trash Bin refreshes immediately.

I will keep you posted in the next few days to tell you whether the fix still works.

Good luck.

PS: I forgot to say that I have 3 machines and they respectively run Win7 Ult, Win7 Pro and Win7 Home Premium. Of course all of them showed this bug.

  8 days and several reboots since the fix and everything is still working fine on all three machines."

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Anonymous
2009-11-04T14:13:31+00:00

Hello tspencer103,

Thank you for posting.

Third party software might be responsible for this behavior. I would suggest you clean boot Windows to find out the culprit. A clean boot helps to eliminate software conflict. Follow the steps in this KB article to perform this task

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929135

Please post back your findings.

David O

Microsoft Answers Support Engineer

Visit ourand let us know what you think.

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  1. Anonymous
    2012-05-19T00:41:50+00:00

    I've noted these problems in a Win 7 32-bit, Celeron 352-based machine, 2 Gb RAM, that I use for noncritical tasks, an old eMachines W3507A with a ECS 945G-M3 v. 3.0 motherboard.

    I have had intermittent problems with both a non-refreshing desktop requiring manual refresh when files are moved, and new folder icons that don't appear as having contents even though they do.  Killing and restarting explorer.exe was needed periodically, or disk cleanup incl. icons.

    Somewhere I read this might be due to a disconnected network drive.

    Well, I use such a drive, on a server at my employer (a university) that requires a username and password to connect.  It gets into a "disconnected" state each time I reboot the machine, which I usually only do after Windows updates, for I use hibernation most of the time.  Hibernation does not disconnect the network drive.

    I rebooted a few days ago, causing the network drive to become disconnected.

    Yesterday I noted the desktop icons not refreshing, and needed to kill and restart explorer.exe.

    Tonight I created a new folder on the desktop, and moved some files into it, but it remained an "empty" folder icon.

    As soon as I clicked on and logged in to (provided a password for) the disconnected network drive, making it "connected", the new desktop folder showed contents.  I did nothing else to make that occur.

    Perhaps the "bugs" occur when there is a disconnected network drive.  Am interested if others have noted similar findings.

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  2. Anonymous
    2012-05-05T16:48:07+00:00

    Brilliant! Thank-you gc117...your fix still works 2 years later (May 2012)

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  3. Anonymous
    2012-03-09T13:49:09+00:00

    Yes. It works. Thank you very much for the hint.

    The only difference is that I found the key at:

    HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Wow6432Node\CLSID{BDEADE7F-C265-11D0-BCED-00A0C90AB50F}

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