Ask Virgil

I've always hated this. I also have my Downloads and Pictures folders pointing to an arbitrary "C:\Downloads" directory that I use. With the Anniversary update to Windows 10, not only did this file get automatically recreated in this directory every hour or so, but the name of the directory kept being changed to Pictures also.

I ran procmon and looked for a SUCCESS result on the creation of desktop.ini. This let me narrow the "culprit" to the Windows Runtime Broker service, and a post (http://www.tenforums.com/network-sharin ... post291643) on how to disable it. However, not only would that have required rebooting my computer—but it seems as if this doesn't really disable it altogether anyway, since, even though marked as disabled, Windows will still start it on its own for certain tasks. (Indeed, after stopping the service manually I would find it started again.)

I decided to rename the two DLL files that are responsible: timebrokerclient.dll and timebrokerserver.dll in C:\Windows\System32. It turns out that these files are owned by TrustedInstaller, and I was unable to rename them. Not letting that stop me, I used a utility called RunAsTI (https://github.com/jschicht/RunAsTI). This utility runs a command prompt after cloning the TrustedInstaller token and assigning it to the new process.

After renaming both of these DLLs, and preventing the service from being started, I no longer have desktop.ini files be recreated—nor have I observed my C:\Downloads directory being renamed.

Note: It seems that without this service, Windows Store apps cannot run. However, I don't use any Windows Store apps—so this is a non-issue for me at the moment.

So, I can't say if it was because of disabling the Runtime Broker service, because of deleting the "system" desktop.ini files (which still should have nothing to do with anything but folder customization), the two of them together, or something else altogether—such as the Anniversary update to Windows 10, which also happened—but shortly after this, and after a reboot, Office components failed to start.

I tried to uninstall Office, but I got an error. I then ripped it out manually, and tried to reinstall it—but I got a different error. No matter what I did, I could not get Office to start. I ended up doing an in-place upgrade of Windows. This preserved all of my programs and settings.

(It ended up making it so my computer could no longer see my Kobo electronic book reader. About an hour of searching after that, I discovered the solution was to reformat my Kobo with FAT32 using the Minitool Partition Wizard (https://www.partitionwizard.com/). It was a simple matter for me to set it up again and put the books I hadn't read back on. That particular problem was defininitely caused by the Windows 10 Anniversary update and involved a file format incompatibility. A fix will be released in the next Windows 10 update.)

Since all of that, desktop.ini files are no longer being recreated, nor are directories being renamed. What I suspect happened is that the first time I did this, I didn't reboot my computer. But the second time around, after making the changes I wanted to the folder icons in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FolderDescriptions and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432NodeMicrosoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FolderDescriptions, everything remained stable.

Also, see this for an additional registry location that sets folder icons: https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/812 ... -10-a.html.