re: Welcome to the April Update! (where everyone else is a WTF just like me)

[El_Heffe]

From the very beginning, I've always had these weird, annoying problems with Windows 10.

In File Explorer, I would unpin the default items from Quick Access and pin some folders of my own choosing. After a while my stuff would disappear and the default items would re-appear in their place. Always.

Even worse, my video transcoding program would usually refuse to run, displaying the very [un]helpful error message "The system cannot find the path specified". Numerous e-mails to the program's vendor, asking them "what does this error mean? what path is the program looking for?" were answered by people obviously following a standard customer service script, i.e., their "answers", just barely in English, had absolutely nothing to do with the questions I was asking.

One day, while Googling for a solution to the disappearing Quick Access problem, I discovered that the answer had to do with the folder C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Recent where Windows stores links to every file you have clicked on recently.

In Windows 7, that's the only thing this folder is used for. But, Microsoft decided to also use that directory for some of Windows 10's new features, like Quick Access. So they created two subdirectories there and filled them with all sorts of files with weird names. One of those files, f01b4d95cf55d32a.automaticDestinations-ms, contains the stuff that is pinned to Quick Access.

So, there's this backup script I wrote long, long ago which cleans up some of the cruft that accumulates and then copies all my important files to an external hard drive. Being extremely anal about backups, I run it a lot. It turns out there's a typo which results in the script deleting all the files in the directory mentioned above, AND, all subdirectories.

When run on Windows 7 this typo has no effect since those files can be safely deleted with no harm, and, there are no subdirectories to delete. On Windows 10, things break in mysterious ways. So I fixed the typo in my backup script and now Quick Access works as intended. Not a big deal since it's not all that useful anyway.

And, HOLY SHIT, my video transcoding program now works, too. How is THAT even possible? WTF are they doing?

I hate computers.

[slapout1]

@el_heffe I'd run ProcessMonitor and see what paths your encoding program is trying to access

[Benjamin Hall]

@slapout1 My guess--it's trying to access something in one of the virtualized folders improperly (where Program Files redirects you to if you don't have permissions) and not finding what it's looking for (because it's in that folder that's getting blown away by the braindead script). It's very common for software that does it wrong (usually by not using the APIs and hard-coding paths).

[Rhywden]

@benjamin-hall I'm more of a mind that this program does enumerate the recently used files somewhere. And also doesn't catch exceptions very well because it assumes that this enumeration will never fail.