Double clicking drive icon brings up command prompt

Help! I seem to be having so much trouble with drives. I've got a problem which I've had in the past and was quite easy to sort out with a quick registry hack. However I can't remember what I did, and any search terms I'm inputting into google or MS are completely wide of the mark.

What's happening is, when I open Explorer and double click a drive in the right hand pane, I get a command prompt instead of the contents of the drive, ie D:\ in the command prompt window. I can right click and choose "explore" or I can access the drive from the left hand pane, but not the right hand side. I was hoping to take a backup of my system before going out in about 10 minutes but clearly I'm not backing up such a flakey snapshot as this.

It's the XP install, by the way, not Vista. Can anyone find anything relevant? Many thanks.

Try looking in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\explore\command
Just a guess.
Good luck

I've had a look, but I can't see anything different in either registry, here or on the PC with problems. I'm sure this is the right sort of track, but I don't really know what I'm looking for. Ah! I just had an idea! Yes, you can do something in the registry, but let me try something else first - I'll let you know if it works.

Edit Yes, I remember now. I installed "Open command prompt from here" when I installed XP (as I always do) and somehow that's got itself set as the default action when clicking a drive in the right pane of the Explorer window. The trouble is, the best I can alter it to is "Open" which doesn't give me the list of folders on the left had side. Better than the command prompt though. I added an item "Explore" which won't let me edit or delete it and it doesn't have the path in to associate the action with, it now won't let me add another Explore command as it says there's one already there. I temporarily uninstalled "Open command prompt from here" with a view to adding it again .... but I think I might try a system restore.

Really this dual boot with vista seems to be giving me so many problems. If I could remove the redundant commands it would be something but they're greyed out.

*sigh* best I can do for tonight is get things so when I highlight My Computer in Explorer and then click on a drive in the right hand pane, it opens a view of the contents without the folders on the left hand column. My PC won't restore to a tme when it would do what this one does, ie show an explorer view.

If anyone has any ideas, I'm grasping at straws. I'm sure there's a fairly easy registry fix but I can't find it, nor can I fix the file actions from folder view. Very depressing.

In other words it will Open but not Explore. Setting that as the default action just tells me access is denied for that drive.

Another place to look is folder options-->File types then select drive and click advanced.
Look at what is in the actions box, the cause may be there.
If you find the problem there you can go to
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell and delete the offending registry key.

Good luck

Do you know, you've done it again! Magic! :) I'd gone into Folder Options -->File types etc, but couldn't delete the offending entries. Now I've followed your instructions for the registry and deleted Open and Explore. While they are still there in the right click menu, with Explore in bold, this menu looks exactly like the one on this computer and it is all now WORKING!

My drives once again open from the Explorer window as I want them to. What's more (different thread) they have the proper drive icons. Many thanks, this was incredibly useful and I'm going to save that registry key address in case of future problems. I'm so pleased to have sorted this annoyance out and very grateful for your help :)

No problem. :) Now try not to mess up your drives anymore :)

I'll do my best :) I'm thinking of reinstalling Vista (again!) on this drive as it's by far the more silent and is in a suspended cage. It would be a better option if I decide to go for Vista as my main OS. I don't think I can quite get rid of XP yet, but I'm hoping to take images and basically swap the installs round. If that doesn't work, it'll be fresh installs, but since I'm currently off work on the sick, at least I have the time.

(And I'll try not to mess the drives up!)

The trouble is that Vista seems to be interfering a lot with XP - at least that's all I can put it down to. I've had nothing but these sort of niggly problems since I installed it, not particularly with Vista itself but the rest of my hardware/software and essentially I do want to switch to it from XP.

I've downloaded a trial of Acronis 10 which supports Vista so am making backups of all the drive images and rescue boot discs. As I said in another thread, Windows system restore has a habit of letting you down just when you need it the most and certainly my last two tries at system restore to resolve this problem resulted in XP being "unable to restore my computer" to the requested point.

May the Force be with you. Let me know how it all turn out.

I will do. I see you've acquired another green square, deservedly. I gave you some positive feedback because you've been really helpful. :)