Disable My Documents folder structure completely

[eirogge]

Hi,

first of all: this thread is NOT about changing the path of my documents, disabling administrative shares and/or disabling automatic network shares.

I want to disable the folder structure my documents completely. is this somehow possible? Maybe by unregistering a dll or a regtweak or something?

Thanks for your ideas.

edit: what i tried so far is "regsvr32 /u mydocs.dll" but it seems to have no effect.

[andregcasal]

Hi there!

I don't understand what you mean, you want to disable a folder structure? How do you disable any structure at all?

Do you mean disable Windows relation to those folders? Explain a little bit more your point of view please.

[Greek Teacher]

To somehow disable My Documents is the immediate desire why I joined the forum. I would like no app, such as Adobe Acrobat, to look first at a My Documents folder option to save something.

I am an old DOS man, and save almost all data in individual Directory trees of my choice, on the hard drive of my choice. To me, My Documents is a constant bothering intrusion into my choices.

I do use FileEx, an excellent add-on to Explorer, and that helps a lot, but there are still always the exceptions that first try a My Documents solution.

Does anyone know how to turn it off, except for absolutely necessary things?

[Crash&Burn]

(Must be on XP) - where you can right click on My Docs, and change its location...

Just install tweakUI - The "My Computer" tab will let you assign location for most ANY windows special folder location.

After changing My Docs location, either delete the desktop shortcut or rename it to something more to your liking.

And it goes without saying, one way to 'stop' My Documents is to not use the explorer shell

Edited June 21, 2006 by Crash&Burn

[tommyp]

unregister mydocs.dll? Sorry, re-read first post again.

Edited June 21, 2006 by tommyp

[GrofLuigi]

what i tried so far is "regsvr32 /u mydocs.dll" but it seems to have no effect.

I delete it. That has effect.

But not totally, it is embedded in many dlls/exes.

GL

[hosebeast]

No, you cannot disable these folders completely, not even by replacing explorer.exe.

You see, explorer.exe by itself is not the entire shell. It mainly manages the desktop, and it does so by invoking many different dll files which provide various pieces of shell functionality to all Win32 apps. This is what is meant by "API" (Application Programming Interface).

Specifically, there is a widely-used API function named SHGetFolderPath (actually a group of similar functions, but I am simplifying here). Applications written for the Win32 API assume they can call SHGetFolderPath using the CSIDL_PERSONAL parameter to determine the path to the user's "My Documents" folder. There are other parameters available for Favorites, My Music, My Video, Shared Documents, etc.

Even though you could blow away your "My Documents" folder and you could even delete the registry keys which defined its location, as soon as you run an application which calls this API, Windows will automatically recreate the keys and folder so that it can pass a valid result back to the application.

Naturally, explorer.exe is a heavy caller of this API but so is virtually everything else you might want to run, from Notepad to Firefox to iTunes to Adobe Reader and so on.

Even if you try to stick with text-only programs, many text-only programs for Win32 are written for the Console Mode API (as opposed to being real-mode DOS programs) and some of those may call SHGetFolderPath in certain situations.

So the only foolproof way of getting rid of My Documents is to limit yourself to real-mode DOS programs. In which case you might as well get rid of Windows completely and run those programs on real DOS.