Win + E keyboard shortcut stopped working
What does WIN+E do?
Because troubleshooting System Internals is sweet...
Let's look on an untampered system with Process Monitor to see what exactly happens when we do that.
The steps I take:
- Download and run the program: http://live.sysinternals.com/procmon.exe
- Accept the EULA, reset the filters and filter anything away that's not interesting.
- Clean the log, press WIN+E and stop capturing afterwards.
This leaves me with a bunch of events (as the folder is being opened, etc...), so we look at the first ones:
Note that we're only going to look at the SUCCES ones:
- HKCU? No, current user configuration, too big key.
- HKCU\Software\...\Explorer? No, explorer configuration, too big key.
- C:\Windows\? No, read because it is the working directory
- HKCU\Software\Classes? No, Windows classes, too big key, used to search the next one:
- HKCR\CLSID\{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}? No, renaming this has no effect.
- HKCR\Folder? BINGO!
Seems the contents of that key are way too specific regarding execution,
exploring that key, I would say opennewwindow would be the action WIN+E calls.
Just to verify it, let's adjust the value to Ivo Flipse.
Ouch, I just broke my computer...
BINGO!
How do I solve the problem?
If Ivo Flipse his problem isn't further along the call stack...
Set
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\opennewwindow\command\DelegateExecute
to the default value:
{11dbb47c-a525-400b-9e80-a54615a090c0}
You might want to check the other keys under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\,
they should have the same value as above...