Disable movie/video thumbnail preview under Windows XP
Rather annoyingly, the explorer.exe process under Windows XP can sometimes hang, stop responding, crash or just plain terminate/close itself while it tries to display video/movie thumbnails in any given folder.
The reason for this can be a multitude of issues – like a dodgy codec, etc – and seems to be rather in-discriminant as to which file type it decides to screw up with (AVI, MPG, WMV, ASF, etc).
To get around this problem though, it is possible to easily disable this feature. Either fire up a command prompt or execute this straight from the run dialog box:
regsvr32 /u shmedia.dll
And if you want to re-enable it again at a later date:
regsvr32 shmedia.dll
Now, the only knock-on effect is that you’ll no longer be able to see summary information in the file properties. In my opinion though, it’s a small price to pay!!
Redirecting My Documents shell folder from a login script / commandline
I’ve always been a firm believer in Group Policy redirecting users’ My Documents folders for me – but there’s nothing like the reassurance of a good old batch file carrying this operation out for you.
So how do you do it? Well, the location of My Documents is stored in the registry (which is read by the explorer process when it’s spawned) and is located here:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders\Personal
As you would expect, editing this one value redirects My Docs. So, as part of your network login script, you can achive this automatically by adding in:
reg add “HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders” /v Personal /t REG_EXPAND_SZ /d \\server\%USERNAME% /f
…to redirect to your server using the username of the currently logged on user as the share name.
Did you find this hint useful? Are you looking to learn more? Well, here’s a few books that I’ve found useful – have a goosie!
 Active Directory for Dummies |
 Microsoft Windows Shell Script Programming |
 Microsoft Windows Script Host |
 Mastering Windows Server 2003 |
