IE8 - Favorites are now suddenly hidden!

About 3 weeks ago, I performed a clean install of XP Media Center Edition SP3 on a client's tower. Before formatting the drive, I backed up all his data including the IE favorites. After the clean install was done (drivers, updates, etc), I migrated his data (My Documents, etc) and Favorites back to the PC. I always double-triple check everything in scenarios like this to be sure everything is 100%... the Favorites were working perfectly. However, somehow in the past 2-3 weeks, the IE8 Favorites have been labeled as "hidden". I have to use "Folder Options" and enable the viewing of hidden files just to view the shortcuts when I open the Favorites folder. When IE8 is open, and I click on "Favorites" only favorites added in the past 2-3 days show up; so where there is actually about 80 shortcuts in the Favorites folder, only the newest 6 or 8 show up. How do I "un-hide" the shortcuts in the Favorites folder w/o having to go thru one-by-one and doing the ol' right-click-properties-uncheck-the-hidden-box routine? I have tried using the "Reset Internet Explorer Settings" in the Advanced tab in the Tools menus, that did nothing; I tried selecting all the hidden shortcuts/favorites, being careful to NOT include any of the newer un-hidden ones, then right-clicking, but the "Hidden" box is greyed out and cannot be changed when multiple items are selected. I did find something online that said "On the Advanced tab, click to clear the 'Enable Personalized Favorites Menu' check box, and then click OK" but there is no box for 'Enable Personalized Favorites Menu', at least not in IE8....
:banghead

(I'm trying very hard to avoid a System Restore since it is somewhat unreliable when it comes to what it keeps and what seems to disappear after the restore is done)

 

If you do what I bolded, do the favorites stay put, or do they disappear?

 

On my XP computer, I am able to highlight all files and select hidden, so I am not sure what is happening. You can try this.

Open a command prompt.

Should read C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\

Type:

CD Favorites <enter>
Attrib -h *.* /s <enter>

Just did this on my computer with the +H switch and it changed all my favorites to hidden.

The /s switch is used to change the attribute of any files in subfolders.

I just read David's post and I like his idea.

 

@ motc7: If I do 'em one-by-one, they stay un-hidden...

@ DavidGP: Yup. I figured that out 15 min after I posted!!! The "Favorites" folder itself was not hidden, but it did have the option to hide it on the Properties menu; so I hid it, applied the setting to all subfolders and files, then I un-hid it and applied the setting to all subfolders and files and it worked beautifully! I have re-booted 3 times and all is well....

Hopefully he won't figure out how to re-hide them again! LOL

Thanks for the quick answers guys!

(@ tgell: I guess you were posting as I was typing this - thanks but the problem has been solved, but I WILL save the info from your post since there have been times in the past where I needed to run attrib from the command line on an entire folder and not just on certain files in a folder, so your post should prove helpful when this comes up again - thx)