Very Irritating XP Sort Bug w/ pictures

[EneergE]

With little success after searching many hours trying to locate a solution for this extremely irritating problem I am having, I decided to create this post. When sorting icons and you have the "Show In Group" option set, USB Flash Drives, as well as a few icons within "My Computer" appear shuffled rather than in order. To better demonstrate this problem, here is a couple screenshots illustrating both:

MY COMPUTER - Look at the "OTHER" section. A few items are not in alphabetical order. Right-click>Refresh puts everything back where it needs to be, but very annoying because if I change tabs and come back the order is out of wack again.

FLASH DRIVE - The problem is more obvious here.

I have a USB external harddrive so I decided to copy the exact contents from the flash drive to it to see if it was a USB related error. I was unable to reproduce the problem. So it appears to be a problem only with flash drives as far as I know at the moment (AFAIK ATM). The bug as pictured in the screenshot occurred while using a 2gb Sandisk Cruzer Micro flash drive. However, I was also able to reproduce this with an 8gb Sandisk Micro. If anyone else has one of these flash drives, can you give it a try and see if it suffers from the same problem?

Also, anyone who has any other brand of flash drive, can you test yours to see if its all flash drives in general that will suffer from this problem or if it's just Sandisk drives?

I purged the following keys attempting to fix the problem:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\CabinetState\Settings

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\StreamMRU

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\BagMRU

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\Bags

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\ShellNoRoam\BagMRU

After purging all of these, the problem still exists.

Please, if anyone could help with this issue, I would gladly appreciate it.

OS: Windows XP PRO

Edited January 10, 2008 by EneergE

[m4p]

There is a SaveSettings (I believe that is what it's called) tweak for saving the sort order I had found that helped with keeping things sorted. These are registry tweaks so I would recommend backing up your registry first. Here's the website:

http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_tweaks.htm

and this site:

http://www.tweakxp.com/article37934.aspx

(and I think it might be under User Interface tweaks or Usability tweaks

[Tarun]

What theme is that and where did you get it? Just wondering if perhaps it's a theme related issue.

[EneergE]

It is Razor 1.2 theme. It is not a theme bug, I tried the classic style and it's still a problem. I have not tried your advice m4p, yet, but I will as soon as I get back home.

However, can anyone reproduce this bug with their flash drives?