Published Sunday, July 03, 2005 5:30 PM by robertvv

IE's favorites disappear

It happened to me several times now, that when working with IE my favorites suddenly disappear. The solution to this is very simple, but I keep forgetting it so I decided to write it down.

The problem with the disappearing favorites is, is that either the value type in the Registry is wrong, somehow REG_EXPAND_SZ was changed to REG_SZ which causes the variable %USERPROFILE% not te be expanded, or the value itself was changed to C:\WINDOWS\FAVORITES. In both cases, it resulted in an empty favorites menu in IE. Which is very annoying.

Here's the solution.

  1. Open the Registry Editor (Start | Run | regedt32.exe or regedit).
  2. Browse to the key: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVerion\Explorer\User Shell Folders.
  3. Look up the value: Favorites.
  4. If it's value type is not REG_EXPAND_SZ, delete the value and re-create it (type REG_EXPAND_SZ).
  5. Now make sure the value Favorites has as content: %USERPROFILE%\Favorites.
  6. Close the Registry Editor.

 


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