Friends, I Need Your Help ASAP

I've identified what I think "may" be a bug in Windows XP today.

Here is the scenario:

Worked on someone's computer today before work. Newly installed XP Home from Dell.



Go to start>search>pictures, music, or video, put a checkbox in pictures and photos, and then click search.

The problem:

Pictures in his profile, either under My Documents or My Pictures, duplicated in the search.

There were two copies.

Rename one, it renames its copy.

Delete one, it deletes its copy.

Take the view from thumbnail view to details, they are still there.

Navigate to the folder manually, no duplicates.

I found this quite odd. Turned on Indexng Service, did not help.

Installed Sp1, did not help.

Renamed thumbs file and desktop.ini ( a little troubleshooting from the nether region). Did not help.

So I let the guy know I would research this and get back to him.

Next problem:

I went home. All three copies of my Windows XP Pro (He has Home OEM) did the SAME EXACT THING. One of them was a clean install from yesterday.

Weirdness:

If you move the files out of My Documents, and/or My Pictures, the Search no longer duplicates them.

More weirdness:

If you do a search for all files and folders, and use a wildcard, i.e. *.jpg, they do not duplicate.


I have found nothing on this (as a fix) over Google.

Can't even find a mention of it at all in the internal MS KB, and obviously not the public one. Doesn't mean it isn't there, but I can't get a query to pull anything up.

Everyone here thinks I am smoking crack; they've never seen this.

Its happening across 4 completely unrelated computers.

It happens pre and post Sp1.

It smells like a bug. it sounds like a bug. I'm not sure, but is it a bug?


Please try to reproduce the error for me!


Also, if ANYONE has a valid workaround, or a fix, please let me know!

This is a true stumper for me.

 

same results here Adrynlyne
using XP PRO SP1

wierd???

sorry got no work round

 

Well that is odd. I have two machines, both XP Pro with SP1. One was fine, the other had duplicates like you mentioned.

EDIT: Hmm, the difference seems to be that I selected the drive to search on the machine that did not find dupes. There must be some explanation for this oddity.

 

i tried again without search assistant and still got dupes
but i watched carefully (took about twenty goes) and because you search for pictures it says looking in pictures folders first then everywhere else

so if you watch really carefully it scan the users documents and settings my pictures folder then starts scanning the c drive and goes through exactly the same folder again

explains why it wont produce the dupes when you move them out of my pictures

 

I'll try that Jamiko.

 

GLS seems to be onto it. First it searches the "My Documents" folder and then moves onto the C: drive which also has the My Documents folder on it. Seems odd that it would show it in the results twice though.

Which explains why when I selected the C: drive to be searched it only found them one time.

 

Weird.

So that extra scan is making the dupes?

 

Something else I've noticed.

This only happens when you have a lot of files. I only have a couple on this machine and it doesn't happen.

 

There isn't any dupes, it is just showing you that it found it twice (both times in the same place). Sort of like seeing something on your desk from outside the window and also from inside the office. You saw it twice but there is only one thing.

 

Thats what I meant

I should have said duplicate results

 

yeah looks that way it will do the same for music

 

You guys rock!

I really appreciate this.

Its definately a bug, but there is a workaround, which is all I care about.

 

no problem man

certainly livened up a quiet evening

maybe you could mention this to Mr Gates next time you go to one of his pool partys

 

Actually, looking at this, Im not sure if this will work guys.

If I specify the C: drive, it picks up a bunch of useless crap, and not really the same things that doing an automatic search picks up. If that makes any sense.

And there are still dupes on my machine

EDIT: No, they arent duplicate entries. They are in different directories


Oh well, at least I know its a bug, and not my lack of troubleshooting ability.

 

hi Adrynlyne
this has been bugging me so ive fixed this bug myself heres what i got
ive edited the srchui.dll with a hex viewer then saved it as schui.dll (left out
the r) then ive rebooted into safe mode and after saving the original srchui.dll
somewhere safe ive deleted it from this folder C:\WINDOWS\srchasst and
replaced it with the new one i made and put back the r so its now srchui.dll
rebooted(seemed to take a while)
then searched for pictures with no dupes

now im really late for bed but i didnt want this to beat me im going to attach the dll(schui.dll the one with no r) if you want to try it just use the instructions above

ok its 338kb so too big if you want to try it let me know and ill e-mail it too you

now i really need to go to bed

 

Dude, please email it to me!!!!

I'll PM you my address.

You rock!!

 

If you dont mind me asking, how did you figure that out?

I look at the file with a hex editor, and just scratch my head

 

Are the dupes in the search in the same folder? Sometimes a dupe is created in the search screen as soon as you look a file in the search screen - a shortcut to first file is created in a 'recent' folder that when opened, of course, opens the original.

 

Nope, this is a duplicate entry of the same exact file, in the same exact location.

 

Adryn,
I Just tried the search on my machine. There are no dupes when I search.

 

Dunno Kodo. Its happened in 10 machines I've tried myself.

What were the steps you took to search?

 

start.. search. files/folders..
click on pictures music video

check pictures and photo... no key words entered.. hit enter key.. sat and watched.. scratched my ass and burped.. don't think the last two would have had any effect though

 

Where are your pictures stored?


Besides the midget pron folder

 

It sems to me that there may be more than one way to fix this, but with tweakers...who knows what they've installed or done

 

I have dupes in all pic folders on this XP machine and my networked 98SE box. I thought it was the camera wizard that did it...

 

I did some experiments on this, and it seems that the duplicates will not show up if you either moved or renamed the "My Documents" folder, just as long as "My Documents" doesn't stay in its default location and using its default folder name.

Of course, you'll need to move/rename "My Documents" in the proper way (from its properties page).

 

Yeah thats a workaround, but not sure if its what my customer wants.

Im guessing not.

 

adryn, what if you changed the default my documents folder to a new folder that you created?

 

So far as I know, as long as the folder where the pictures are stored are not under My Documents or subfolders, the issue disappears.

Is that what you were asking me?

I still wanna know how to hex edit dll files grrrr(and have them work)

 

Oops...I missed that one. Sorry.

 

*pets his little kitty*

No problem


*Evil cackle*

 

not exactly.if you change the target location for mydocuments to a new folder.. what happens?

 

Ill try that when I get home and let ya know.

I dont have enough jpgs on this particular hunk o' crap to even have them duplicate.

(Seems to only happen when you have large amounts of files.)

Unless jute wants to give it a shot

 

I just did that with my little experiment, no?
By right-clicking on My Documents > Properties and changing the target path to something else...?
There are no dupes as well if the physical folder name is not "My Documents", even if you don't move it out.

 

Oops, I misread your orginal post.

 

jute, you up for being a guinea pig? I have a patch here that may, or may not help.

 

Just send it over.
sattien@hotmail.com

 

sent

 

Testing

 

Fixed it, at least on mine.
But Search won't function at first, but everything's fine after a reboot.
Maybe you want to try it on another guinea pig, just to be sure.

 

yup, my wife tries it next.

 

Didnt work for her

 

good morning im sending it now
i used resource hacker and edited out the search in pictures folder first then everything else and it works a treat
dont get all the crap you get when you specify C drive just the normal results without the dupes

btw im so f+&87in tired this morning you wont believe how long it took me to find the string value for this

 

Thanks so much GLS. I received it and am going to try it out

 

Well, thanks GLS, but I still have the same problem on my test machine.

 

Echo, Adrynalyne. I wanted to help as soon as I saw your call, but I've never even SEEN anything LIKE the pic you put in your first post in this thread, so I was out of it on that count, AND ...

I have NEVER, ever put ANYthing in MY Pictures, My Music, or My Documents, and I have no vids on either of my drives.

Sorry to have been nothing but an interested observer on this one, man.

 

good work g-l-s shame it doesent work for everybody never mind

 

Maybe I'm way off base here, but would Roaming Profiles come into play here? I know this is a Search bug, but this nagged into my brain and had to put this in. Don't know a lot about it. Hopefully someone here can negate/invalidate this guess.

 

hi Adrynalyne yeah i retried this again and it didnt work

anyway i was really tired last night so i must have overlooked something
went back through all my changes i made and i think ive sussed what it was
when you check the pictures music or video box i looked in the advanced options-then more advanced options-and the box to search subfolders was checked automatically
so i edited the lcladvxm.xml in srchasst folder so that it was not checked by default forgot all about that and carried on editing the dll file
anyway once i thought i had it rebooted went to search made sure the subfolders box was unchecked then proceeded to search and hey presto no dupes thought id cracked it because the search window didnt show the searching picture folders first then c drive
so now feeling well pleased with myself i didnt bother trying it again

anyway my dll edit worked in that it didnt search picture folders first but still creates duplicates unless you use the advanced options i listed earlier

sorry about that man im sure theres something im missing just cant put my finger on it anyway hopefully ive helped in some way

moral of the story is always test everything more than once no matter how tired you are