Few days back, there was yet another "revolution" going on regarding my system and my personal principles; in this particular case the "minimalism principle", the principle regarding empty spaces and finally "less than 8 chars in-lenght" directory/file names principle ---- View image here: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/forum/smilies/biggrin.gif -- ...<br><br><br>You see, I re-discovered <i>HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders</i> and <i>HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders</i> registry keys, so that now there is only "<i><b>Data</b></i>" named directory instead of "<i>Application Data</i>", "<i><b>Local</b></i>" instead of "<i>Local Settings</i>", "<i><b>Menu</b></i>" instead of "<i>Start Menu</i>" and so on. And since my experience was that the OS creates them <b>by itself</b> after the reboot, i.e. this happened when I changed the locations of TEMP/TMP directories (user env. variables) to point to my "RAM drive"; I assumed that it will do the same with these directories, and it surely did, however... they were of course empty after rebooting the computer so I just copied all the contents to new locations.<br><br><br>But the problem is that after the reboot, there was already new "<i>UsrClass.dat</i>" file created under the following new location (btw. the newly created one was quite a lot smaller in file-lenght and because of that, i.e. smaller size, I speculated that it must contain some sort of table/list of these "Shell Folders"):<br><br><i>
\Settings\user_name\Local\Data\Microsoft\Windows\</i><br><br>... and although I see now that the file is "locked" by the NT system process and I don't know how I managed to do it, I simply over-wrote it with the old backed-up one (luckily it went ok, I was afraid of screwing the profile for a second there), at that time still located under:<br><br><i>\Settings\user_name\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows\</i><br><br>Eh well and as an additional info; the two other files with the identical name reside under <i>\Settings\LocalService\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows\</i> and <i>\Settings\NetworkService\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows\</i> directories.<br><br><br>P.S., Well and my very last idea is to move the whole Start Menu directory-tree into the RAM drive (except "<i>Programs\Startup\</i>", and I don't use <i>Programs\</i> branch anyway), since I know for sure that there are lots of hard-disk seeks when browsing through sub-menus; I monitored it with Filemon back then. I also just checked it with Process Explorer and it seems that these seeks are caued by shell opening a "File" type handle with path as a "Name" each time.<br><br>I suppose my shell uses a different way of menu caching/querying compare to Explorer as <b>Magus`</b> once said back then... Btw., if anyone wants to see it, look at this post in the "<b>post your win nt/2k/xp desktops here</b>" thread (page 160)<br><br><i>/EDIT:</i> Oh nevermind this "last idea" thing, I realised that I could set the locations in my Blackbox shell's "<i>menu.rc</i>" file (well I already did it, right now) without changing the value of the "Start Menu" registry entry under Shell Folders key.<br><br><br>shirker
\Settings\user_name\Local\Data\Microsoft\Windows\</i><br><br>... and although I see now that the file is "locked" by the NT system process and I don't know how I managed to do it, I simply over-wrote it with the old backed-up one (luckily it went ok, I was afraid of screwing the profile for a second there), at that time still located under:<br><br><i>\Settings\user_name\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows\</i><br><br>Eh well and as an additional info; the two other files with the identical name reside under <i>\Settings\LocalService\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows\</i> and <i>\Settings\NetworkService\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows\</i> directories.<br><br><br>P.S., Well and my very last idea is to move the whole Start Menu directory-tree into the RAM drive (except "<i>Programs\Startup\</i>", and I don't use <i>Programs\</i> branch anyway), since I know for sure that there are lots of hard-disk seeks when browsing through sub-menus; I monitored it with Filemon back then. I also just checked it with Process Explorer and it seems that these seeks are caued by shell opening a "File" type handle with path as a "Name" each time.<br><br>I suppose my shell uses a different way of menu caching/querying compare to Explorer as <b>Magus`</b> once said back then... Btw., if anyone wants to see it, look at this post in the "<b>post your win nt/2k/xp desktops here</b>" thread (page 160)<br><br><i>/EDIT:</i> Oh nevermind this "last idea" thing, I realised that I could set the locations in my Blackbox shell's "<i>menu.rc</i>" file (well I already did it, right now) without changing the value of the "Start Menu" registry entry under Shell Folders key.<br><br><br>shirker