After a wee bit O’ overzealous registry cleaning last week, I had a minor panic. Well, a picture being worth a 1000 words, here’s what I saw when I opened windows explorer:

The good news (I suppose) is that I knew the instant I hit the Delete key that I had selected the wrong key. The bad news was that I had no way of finding out what key that was.

So, I did some Googling for various permutations of “missing windows explorer folder treeview” and eventually stumble upon the following registry edit:

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{EFA24E64-B078-11d0-89E4-00C04FC9E26E}]
@=”Explorer Band”

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{EFA24E64-B078-11d0-89E4-00C04FC9E26E}\InProcServer32]
@=”C:\\WINNT\\SYSTEM32\\SHDOCVW.DLL”
“ThreadingModel”=”Apartment”

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{EFA24E64-B078-11d0-89E4-00C04FC9E26E}\Implemented Categories]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{EFA24E64-B078-11d0-89E4-00C04FC9E26E}\Implemented Categories\{00021493-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}]

I saved that to a new notepad document, saved it with an “.reg” extension and double-clicked it. Voila, my missing treeview returned!

It sure beats reinstalling the OS for something so simple.

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