Phantom Folders after moving Public Folders

[davewilldo]

Hi,
Back in 2011 members of the forum kindly assisted when I was fighting Microsoft when trying to move the Public folders to another drive.
All worked out well and as time went by the usual degradation of Windows occured until this Christmas holiday I decided to do a re-install.
Re-installs are no problem because I only use the machine as a Media Center and all the recorded media is now on the second large AV drive D:.
So the process is to delete and freshly install Windows, move the Public folders location to D:, and off we go with a nice new install that does not hesitate, hang or play jerky BluRay movies!
Marvellous, except that when I allowed Microsoft update to run I lost all USB functionality, could not move the Recorded TV folder from D:\ to D:\Public\Recorded TV and could not connect Media Tool over my home network.
NO PROBLEM!
Quick re-install and disable updates, Media Center works OK and as I do not browse the internet on the Media Center I am not too stressed about security updates. I don't even bother with local anit-virus as it's all in the main network firewall so everything is OK.
EXCEPT, I now have Phantom 'Public' folders in all my D:\Public\ folders.
For example D:\Public\Music has a Public Music folder within, and likewise for all the standard/default folders.
These Phantom folders are only visible via Media Center and not via the network or via the local Windows Explorer.
If I select them in Media Center I have the "Windows is searching for Media..etc" dialogue.
Does anyone know what have I done?

[CyberSimian]

I now have Phantom 'Public' folders in all my D:\Public\ folders. For example D:\Public\Music has a Public Music folder within, and likewise for all the standard/default folders. These Phantom folders are only visible via Media Center and not via the network or via the local Windows Explorer.

One of the quirks that I have noticed with Vista (and this may have been inherited by Win7) is that Media Center repeatedly adds the four public media folders (Music, Pictures, Recorded TV, Videos) to its list of folders to scan, resulting in multiple occurrences of those four folders in the list of folders. You can see this in the MC "Library Setup" dialogue, and if you use REGEDIT to examine the corresponding registry entries, you will find multiple occurrences there too.

The MC "Library Setup" dialogue does not allow you to delete those entries, so I tried editing the registry to remove the duplicates. That worked, but within a short time the duplicate entries had reappeared! I no longer worry about this. If those folders are empty (in my case, they are), MC will take no time at all to scan them when building its various lists of media. (If I am using REGEDIT for something else, I will occasionally clear out the duplicates, but life is too short to obsess over this!)

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

[davewilldo]

Hi CyberSimian,
Thanks for that, I will try a regedit and see if it works.
At present I am battling with the EPG problems you helped me with on my other post.
Another real annoyance is the continual background updating of the guide that puts all the XXX and Radio channels back in every week, it really annoys me.
I have done the background scanning registry edits for this to no avail.
However I saw a post that says if you delete the channel completely in "Edit Channels" it goes away, that's my next attempt.
Cheers and wishing you a prosperous New Year