Can't remove "My Documents" from Desktop

I moved my documents and other directories/files to Drive E and named it Documents. Now when I open explorer "My Documents" show back up. In checking properties, they are short cuts to E drive, but I don't need them or want them to show up. I would like to open explorer to the drives and not have to do away with My documents first.

You all have been a big help in helping me get my email, favorites, etc moved so they would be accessed from both OS.
Thanks
Baldy

 

As I am not quite sure I understand what you want, you can read the post as a suggestion instead of a solution.

To remove "my document" icom from the desktop(works in XP, notsure others):
Right click the blank area of your desktop, then Properties->Desktop tab-> Customize Desktop
Then clear the check box before my document.

I seldom run explorer to access disks. double click "my computer" is my favourite way.

 

Open WE (Windows Explorer) and right click on wherever in the file tree you want WE to open, choose "send to" and make a shortcut to your desktop. You can rename it and/or change the icon, if you want, by right clicking on the shortcut icon and choosing properties. Then you can either drag it to your Quick Launch toolbar and delete the desktop icon, or leave it there for your convenience.

Johanna

 

Baldy - try each of these by clicking start then run then putting this line in and clicking OK. See which (if any) of them behave as you want and if you find one, make a shortcut using it and you will have a good way to start Windows Explorer for yourself.

I dragged my preference to the quick start area so I can launch WE from there.

%systemroot%\explorer.exe /n,/root
%systemroot%\explorer.exe /e,/root
%systemroot%\explorer.exe /n,/select,C:
%systemroot%\explorer.exe /e,/select,C:
%systemroot%\explorer.exe /n,/select,E:
%systemroot%\explorer.exe /e,/select,E:

Note there is not a space other than the one after explorer.exe.

 

Remove "My Documents "

I've got the icon off of the desktop, but "My Documents are still listed under "Desktop" in the tree. That where I need them removed. I've tried the Commands Newt gave and the 4th one down works good, but after having a shortcut sent to desk top it reverts back to one like the command #3. There are thousands of shortcuts under Desktop in My Documents that are useless. It would be real easy to accidently put files in those directries and end up looseing them.

Thanks
Baldy

 

Afraid I'm confused then. I use the same option that you like and when I open Explorer, there is a My Documents line on there (not sure you can get rid of it) but above all the drives so not where I ever would mess with it by accident.

Are you seeing something different?

 

My Documents

I'm still trying to get rid of My Documents from on top of the list. The option you gave lets me open explorer to to the drives without the file folder task etc down the left side. My Documents must be apart of Desktop like My Briefcase. I may not be able to get rid of it.
Thanks Again
Baldy

 

Have you tried right clicking on the My Documents shortcut in Windows Explorer and choosing Delete? I don't know whether that works or whether Windows will complain if it is deleted, though, since My Documents is a system folder. Since the My Documents entry you're referring to is only a shortcut, Windows may not care if it's gone.

 

Click start>run and type gpedit.msc. In the window the opens go to User Configuration\Administrative Templates>Desktop. Look in the right pane for "Remove My Documents icon on the desktop ". Double click and in the window that opens, enable the setting. In the same window you can click on the explain tab to find out what the setting does. Heres a quote from some of what it says on that tab. Have a look at the rest of it though.

Unless I'm not understanding you correctly, it looks like this will do what you want.

 

Note that from what I read, gpedit.msc is only found in XP-pro. They left it out of XP-home for some reason.

Can't say first hand as I've never used XP-home but I'm pretty sure it isn't there.

 

Thanks for the reminder Newt. You're right. In any case, there must be a registry hack that will do it if you can do it with gpedit. I'll mess with it a bit here and see what I can come up with.

 

Can't remove "MyDocuments" from Desktop

This question is very similar my question re: having too many "My Documents" in explorer.exe.

If someone is able to "hack" gpdeit.msc for XP home as suggested by Zander, will doing that delete all the sub-folders also? - causing loss of all documents?

In explorer.exe XP Home, if you delete one of the "My Documents" all are deleted.

 

No, if you use this setting you won't lose your documents. You'll still have access to them as you would any other folder in windows explorer. The following quote is from the explanation of the setting in gpedit.

I messed around with this a bit the other night to see if I could find the reg entries it makes. I managed to track them down but it seems there's more to it than just the registry entries. It seems that it also writes to the ntuser.pol file in your documents and settings\username folder. Before I made the setting ntuser.pol was 8 bytes in size. Immediately after making the setting it was something like 478 bytes (or something close to that) . I had a look at the file in Notepad and from the parts I could read, it seems to have entries in it that point to the registry entries that were made by the setting. After removing the setting the file was once again 8 bytes. I'm not really sure if this has something to do with it or not but I can tell you that trying to set the policy by just adding the reg entries doesn't work. At least not for me. Maybe Newt or somebody else will know more about this file. So, I really don't know what to tell you if you don't have gpedit. Sorry.

 

I tried this again and mangaged to get it to work. I had a second look and found that there's only one registry entry necessary. Go to HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\NonEnum and create a new DWORD Value. This is the name to give it:
{450D8FBA-AD25-11D0-98A8-0800361B1103}

Give it a value of 1. Log off and then back on and it should be gone.

 

No luck in Home

That doesn't work for me in Home Edition. There's only Explorer, no NonEnum, under Policies, and I tried adding NonEnum to Policies and also tried adding the DWORD to Explorer, and neither worked to remove My Documents from explorer.exe.

(I have desktop icons turned off, but it's there if I turn them on)

 

Don't know what to tell you sparrow. I don't have a home box here so I'm not able to check it out at this time. My boy has it and sometime in the next couple of days I'll try to have a look at it. I'll post back as to what I find. Perhaps it doesn't work with Home. The only suggestion I could make at this time would be to make sure you had the right registry key. I don't suppose there is any chance you started in HKLM instead of HKCU? Probably not but it's the only thing I can come up with right now. I find it odd that it wouldn't work with Home but I suppose it's possible.

Baldy
Have you had any success with any of this? I've been gone for a while and am sort of trying to catch up with things here.

 

It does work.

Zander,
I tried it again, adding NewEnum with the key and value, and it does work in home. Must have been a typo. Anyway, thanks a lot.

 

Unless someone has invented a tweak, what Baldy wants to do can't be done. It is a system folder. Whatever is done to that folder at the top of the tree will be done to the folder in its target location.

His only alternative is not use the My Documents folder and make it hidden. It will be locked and unused.

 

sparrow
Those typos will get you every time. I thought it odd that it wouldn't work in Home too. So much so I did some searching on this and found this MS webpage. It's a page that has all the gpedit settings and the related registry entries. Well, I can't say all of them for sure as I haven't taken the time to go through and compare it real thoroughly but at the very least there's quite a few of them. It says it's for Win2K but I tried several of them and they all worked on XP Pro. If you're interested, have a look. If you want to know what each setting does, look in the left frame and click on the plus next computer configuration and/or user configuration and drill down through the various folders until you find the setting you're looking for. Click on it and an explanation will be shown in the right frame.

Group Policy Registry Table

 

Zander - Xp-home don't got group policy (or gpedit).

I often wish it did since it's the easiest way to make some tweaks that a home user certainly might want to make. For instance, if you got kids, you need group policy.