   _____  _____   ___  ___ __ 
  /  |  \|  _  \  \  \/  /|  |
 /       \   __/   \    / |  |
 \       /  |       \  /  |  |
  \_____/|__|        \/   |__|

PRESENTS:

More 'features' in Win 9x.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
	Anybody running a Win 9x box particularly one with IE4 or IE5 installed will have noticed that some folders such as your fonts folder, 'My Briefcase' and the 'Recycle Bin' behave differently to normal folders. Perhaps you want them to behave like normal folders, or create them in other places, or just bugger about with them a bit. Here's how it works. In any folder such as this, there will be a hidden file called 'desktop.ini'. Editing it will produce something along the lines of:

[.ShellClassInfo]
UICLSID={BD84B380-8CA2-1069-AB1D-08000948F534}

	This one is taken from my fonts folder. The '[.ShellClassInfo]' bit is found in all of these files, and means nothing. Its basically a comment. The next line may vary from folder to folder. A Common variation is to have CLSID instead of UICLSID. The value after the = sign is the important one, and will be different for every desktop.ini file. Creating a folder anywhere named xxx.{BD84B380-8CA2-1069-AB1D-08000948F534} (the xxx can be anything and can be any number of characters) will create a folder with the same properties as the fonts folder. The same applies for whatever else is after the '(UI)CLSID=' bit. When you've made yourself a few Recycle Bins and stuff, you will probably ask what exactly the point of this is. For a start you can delete desktop.ini, and make it behave like a normal folder. If your 'History' folder is pissing you off or something. But more importantly,  most of you will probably have seen a list looking something like this:

Network Neighborhood.{208D2C60-3AEA-1069-A2D7-08002B30309D}
Printers.{2227A280-3AEA-1069-A2DE-08002B30309D}
My Computer.{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}
Control Panel.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}
InterNet.{3DC7A020-0ACD-11CF-A9BB-00AA004AE837}
Recycle Bin.{645FF040-5081-101B-9F08-00AA002F954E}
Brief Case.{85BBD920-42A0-1069-A2E4-08002B30309D}
Internet Explorer.{871C5380-42A0-1069-A2EA-08002B30309D}
DUN.{a4d92740-67cd-11cf-96f2-00aa00a11dd9}
Task Scheduler.{D6277990-4C6A-11CF-8D87-00AA0060F5BF}

	Recognise the layout? None of these are actually folders, and therefore do not have a desktop.ini file associated with them. For example, Control Pannel is stored as a series of files named .cpl in your \windows\system folder which can all be accessed individually. The program which puts each of these components into their 'folder' is called control.exe and is located in the root of your windows folder. But searching for the string 'clsid' in your registry will spew out a lot of interesting material. Obviously you'll have to wade through all the crap to get to it, as a lot of information about the way that Windows operates is stored in this way. The uses for these are practically limitless. Your sysadmin has probably limited access to most of this stuff, so you can just make yer own copies of the stuff.

	Having tried many ways of getting a difinitive list of these files, its actually made pretty damn difficult for you. 'dir /s /ah desktop.ini' returns 2 files, and needless to say Windoes Find is worse than useless, 'attrib /s > file.txt' and searching the file for the string desktop.ini gets most of them, but for some reason fails to locate some. Try them both to see what I mean. If anybody can get any better results than this, please contact me (ergophobe@dial.pipex.com).

	And the moral, the registry holds the key (sorry bad pun) to just about everything in Windows. Leave no stone unturned.

ergophobe