Windows Explorer Acting Very Weird

[racketboy]

My biggest annoyance currently is that certain folders in Explorer don't always stay sorted correctly.

I usually have stuff sorted by "type" but sometimes it spontaneously puts files and folders in random order. totally random. It normally happens right after I copy files to that directory or change file names or something.

I hit F5 to refresh and sometimes it puts them back. Then it will do it again later.

It started happening after I tried running this old DOS program that I thought my wife might like for her students. Anyway, it seems like that messed something up. I ran virus scan, spyware scan, Windows Update, restored default settings in Explorer -- nothing seemed to help.

Any ideas?

I'm running XP Pro, BTW

 

[racketboy]

no ideas?

 

[it290]

You already reset all the folders to defaults, it sounds like? Hmm.. what was the program that you think caused this strange behavior?

 

[racketboy]

I was this old music game that ran in DOS that I got from The Underdogs.

The reason I thought of it is after I ran it, it changed the date in Windows to something like the year 5314. That made WMP crash (took me a little while to figure out what happened).

 

[it290]

Hmm, freaky. It probably just changed the hardware clock though... probably wouldn't effect sorting by name, type, etc. (or date - it didn't change the timestamp on your files, I assume?).. Perhaps by setting the date so radically far in the future, it caused some obscure bug to occur in explorer, but I kind of doubt that as well... perhaps there's a different reason for the strange behavior.

I'm baffled, but it's intriguing, regardless.

 

[Taelon]

That gives me an idea... When you run Scandskw (the Windows GUI version of Scandisk), it gives you an option to repair invalid time/date stamps found on any files. Or at least view which ones are invalid, don't exactly remember right now (as I've used XP for a long time now). Anyway, the thing is that Windows will consider all dates/times that are in the future (relative to current system time) to be invalid.

it290 could be right, and this will get Explorer to behave normally again, once fixed.