Not getting past the title: This is not the bug you’re looking for

Raymond Chen

A customer liaison reported that the customer could not rename folders in Explorer. After entering the new name, they got an error message

  Rename Folder ×
The file or folder does not exist.
OK

The customer liaison reported that comparing with a machine that does not exhibit the problem revealed that some registry keys had been deleted. Restoring those keys made everything work again. These keys were apparently deleted by some tool they ran.

The customer liaison also noticed that there was an update that fixed a bunch of problems, including this one:

Addressed an issue that was causing Windows Explorer to perform an endless, rapid refresh of a network drive that is mapped to a share, preventing users from performing tasks such as rename object.

The customer liaison wanted to know if the fix above is related to the problem they were having.

Um, let’s look at the problem they’re having: They can select a folder to be renamed, they can enter a new name, and when they hit Enter, Explorer tries to perform the rename operation, and it fails for some mysterious reason.

Now let’s look at the problem that the fix addresses: When viewing a network drive that is mapped to a share, Explorer goes into an infinite refresh loop. Due to the refresh loop, you can’t perform any operations like renaming, because the act of refreshing cancels the edit control, so you never get a chance to hit Enter.

These don’t appear to be related at all. The only similarity is they both have the words “Explorer” and “rename”.

The fix for the customer’s problem is to stop deleting random registry keys.

 

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