You get "Could not find this item..." error

[thepicnicband]

Ok... not a question so I hope the mods will forgive me for pre-empting a very probable future question and providing a solution.

(Vista/Windows 7 only)
After installing "Microsoft Security Essentials" you get the error message:

Could Not Find This Item
This is no longer located in C:\Users\etc. etc.

This happens when you
(a) create and rename a folder
(b) move a folder
(c) move a file

There was a problem with an old KB update (KB980408) but it was fixed with a later update. Installing MSE can suddenly bring the problem back.

The error has a "Try again" button and when you press it it then works. It's most irritating and a lot of people just learn to put up with it.

To cure the problem add the following to the registry (either manually or by creating a text file which you change from .txt to .reg and then double click on to add it). (Please PM me if you are unsure about exactly how to do this and I'll gladly do my best to help.)

[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FolderDescriptions\{2112AB0A-C86A-4ffe-A368-0DE96E47012E}]

[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FolderDescriptions\{2112AB0A-C86A-4ffe-A368-0DE96E47012E}\PropertyBag]

[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FolderDescriptions\{491E922F-5643-4af4-A7EB-4E7A138D8174}]

[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FolderDescriptions\{491E922F-5643-4af4-A7EB-4E7A138D8174}\PropertyBag]

[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FolderDescriptions\{7b0db17d-9cd2-4a93-9733-46cc89022e7c}]

[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FolderDescriptions\{7b0db17d-9cd2-4a93-9733-46cc89022e7c}\PropertyBag]

[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FolderDescriptions\{A302545D-DEFF-464b-ABE8-61C8648D939B}]

[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FolderDescriptions\{A302545D-DEFF-464b-ABE8-61C8648D939B}\PropertyBag]

[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FolderDescriptions\{A990AE9F-A03B-4e80-94BC-9912D7504104}]

[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FolderDescriptions\{A990AE9F-A03B-4e80-94BC-9912D7504104}\PropertyBag]

Hope this helps someone but please do remember that you use this info at your own risk. I won't be held accountable if you screw anything up. IMPORTANT: I've used this fix successfully in the real world on Vista and W7 machines ONLY. I've never run into the problem happening on earlier MS OSs.

[Dan Graves]

The best way to avoid this : don't use microsoft's xx--xx MSE suite 
Even AVG does better than MSE.

[thepicnicband]

It's true, AVG is very good and gets the pole position with LifeHacker readers
see http://lifehacker.com/5399564/five-best-antivirus-applications
but my own tests (done about a year ago using several of the most common viruses) put Avast ahead of it so that's what I've been recommending to clients.
One thing to bear in mind is that MSE is more than just anti-virus. It finds a lot of other "badware" too which the bog standard free version of AVG does not.
I've not done any actual testing with MSE but I've been hearing a lot of very good things about it on the Wilders Security forums and other well respected corners of the internet security world. It's come a long way in a very short space of time and only scores one percentage point less in the LifeHacker league table of the top 5 so I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand.

One thing I am amazed about is the number of ordinary punters who still use McAfee and Norton whose success is undoubtedly down to pure marketing (one of the two is usually bundled as a limited trial with new PCs) plus the fact that many people convince themselves that something must be good 'cos it has to be paid for.
My own opinion of course but I consider Norton (especially) to be so bad that I tell clients in advance that I must uninstall it completely while I'm working on any given machine.

[Ragz]

The best way to avoid this : don't use microsoft's xx--xx MSE suite 
Even AVG does better than MSE.

i don't agree. MSE has found stuff that avg never did for me.

[TB-AV]

My own opinion of course but I consider Norton (especially) to be so bad that I tell clients in advance that I must uninstall it completely while I'm working on any given machine.

...and what's really strange is that has been the situation with Norton for ages...

[Wishbone]

Strangely enough....... I spent a couple of hours on an XP box today that had been infected with 'Security Tool'. Fifteen minutes removing it and the rest tidying up, securing and giving the box a tweak and some updates. MSE had been bent over and royally buggered, stuck in a cupboard and disabled; so yay for that.

TPB-

That's the same advice I give anybody who wants me to fix their PC. Norton stuff is such bloated crud that I won't deal with it. Dunno if anyone remembers the 'AtGuard' firewall?........ Freebie app, tiny little memory footprint, did it's job with no fuss?............ not after Symantec bought it and built their bloody Norton firewall around it.


What I don't understand, is why I'm always cleaning out PC's infected with some of the most basically avoidable s**t on the 'net. I run a simple AV and a third party firewall that does what I set it up to do and doesn't bother me unless it sees something unusual (very rare), or I've just installed something new and need to set up some rules. In all my mooching about on the 'net, I've never had an infection that wasn't stopped cold before it had a chance of becoming a problem. It's not like I have to keep an ever present process of watching and maintaining my defenses, either. I just periodically check everything's running ok and leave it to do it's thing.

But people whose PC's I get to fix, seem to get mauled all the time doing the simplest of things. Some people should stick to consoles 

[Dan Graves]

The best way to avoid this : don't use microsoft's xx--xx MSE suite 
Even AVG does better than MSE.

i don't agree. MSE has found stuff that avg never did for me.

You ever tried to recover a system running MSE that has been hit with smithfraud or one of it's many mutations Ragz ?
Let me tell you, it's hellish.
MSE gets so thoroughly infected by many of these bugs, because of the way it is implemented, that once it's hit, it's basically game over.
It's not always about detections.
Especially since there are so many false positives and outright wrong detections out there.

Without going into too much detail, a while back i wrote a crack for a piece of popular software, and although it was written for a few friends, the crack started doing the rounds, and as a result of that, last week when i tried to use it on a friend's pc his ever so smart MSE kept telling me it was a "trojan horse dropper".
"Amazing!", i thought to myself, "now microsoft's handy suite knows cracks i compiled myself better than i do!".
So yeah, i'd have a lot of faith in this suite... 

Dunno if anyone remembers the 'AtGuard' firewall?........ Freebie app, tiny little memory footprint, did it's job with no fuss?............ not after Symantec bought it and built their bloody Norton firewall around it.

Oh, i remember that.
Vividly.
It was perfect, and then Symantec bought up the company and buggered it up.
Just like how they did with l0phtcrack when they bought out l0pht heavy industries...

[TB-AV]

Dan, wasn't MSE doing it's job?

I mean if you have compromised software on your PC and MSE alerts you to that fact. Isn't that a good thing?

The fact that you wrote it and know exactly what it is, is beside the point. MSE still noticed your work. That's it's job right?

[Dan Graves]

It's job is to stop harmful software.
Not to make judgements on illegally obtained software, unles said software is infected with actual malware.
But it's more of a discussion of right > wrong than anything else.

[old-and-in-the-way]

Dan, wasn't MSE doing it's job?

I mean if you have compromised software on your PC and MSE alerts you to that fact. Isn't that a good thing?

The fact that you wrote it and know exactly what it is, is beside the point. MSE still noticed your work. That's it's job right?

No.  Further to Dan's comment, which is entirely reasonable (the software is meant to keep you safe, not dictate to you what you can or cannot do with YOUR computer), when these kinds of tools start misidentifying software that you know is safe, you start to find yourself in an interesting place where you can't trust the thing that is meant to be protecting you.

If you know something is safe, and anti-whatever software tells you it isn't, do you trust it not to break your computer?  It might tell you it isn't deliberately, on account of the vendor not approving of the software.  OTOH, it might be a bug.

For example:  http://www.symantec.com/outbreak/index.jsp?id=mcafee_virus_def_defect

Any security software vendor who deliberately blocks non-harmful activities just because they don't approve of them runs the risk of causing people not to trust that tool not to harm their system.  It's bad enough that accidental bugs undermine the necessary trust.  Deliberately attacking the user's trust is a direct attack against the security of the whole system.

(The US DOD defines trust as something like  "A trusted system is any system whose failure results in compromised security" -- that's a pretty solid rule of thumb to live by)

[Ragz]

Picnic:

Have you resolved the error?
If not, try the following in a dos prompt:

go to "Start", "Run" (if you don't see run press the Windows Key + R)
Type in "cmd" and press "ok". a command prompt will open.
Go to the drive where the undeletable folder resides for example D:
So you will have type in D: <enter>
go to the folder where the problem folder is located. example:  D:\_cache\delete\
Let's assume the folder is called "test" (d:\_cache\delete\test)

so you would type:
D:<enter>
cd _cache\delete<enter> (As you can see you don't open the problem folder itself)
type: dir /x<enter>. A directory listing will appear containing the
8.3 names of the folders and files, in my case it showed: test
then type: rd test<enter> (replace test with the folder name
you see)
The folder will be deleted.

use "del" instead of "rd" for single files


As for the a/v argument, Dan:
Well, as always, everyone has their favourites and are completely biased in their opinions.
For me, i wouldn't touch AVG with a 10ft barge pole, why? Because a system i was fixing had that installed and it did nothing to fix the problem. All it would do is say "you've got x virus/trojan/backdoor/whatever". It didn't and couldn't resolve the issue.
Uninstalled it and dropped MSE on and guess what... It removed the problem, without any sort of argument.

What you have to remember is that, like other a/v programs, MSE is one of the newer ones around. And sure it has it's bugs. Like everything else. But for what i need, it does it's job perfectly. It also has regular updates and fixes applied to it, which in my opinion is important. It's a good thing.
False positives aside (which a lot of a/v apps report), i think it's one of the better free apps out there.
Of all the a/v apps i would recommend if you want to pay for one, i would always say Kaspersky (which reported false positives a lot and also missed things that MSE has picked up on from a few MAME Roms that a friend gave me). I used that until this year when i looked into MSE and found it to be well within my expectations for an a/v program.

So while you may be right about that particular incident, Dan. I've seen the same problem occur with other viruses and such with several different a/v apps. People trust what people trust. That's never changed in the almost 20 years i've been working in IT. A bit like the argument of AMD vs Intel. Back in the day there was another CPU vendor known as Cyrix. How many of you had one of those in your machine? Once upon a time though, they were almost on par with Intel. But no one trusted them as very few had any experience with them.

[Wishbone]

Christ....... I had a couple of Cyrix boxes......... a 166+ and a 200+...... That's going back that, Ragz. I built a couple of them for people and you're right about how you really had to sell the buggers; If it wasn't Pentium, it wasn't real. They were bloody good CPU's, they were.

I've got an AMD 300mhz Slot A box still going strong too. Museum piece now, but my eldest still uses it, so it's still useful.

[Cue Zephyr]

I have to ask TPB... how did Avira do against AVG and Avast (and others)?

[thepicnicband]

@Ragz

Have you resolved the error?

Erm.. thanks for that. I have resolved the error (as outlined above) in several of my clients' PCs. The post was just an attempt to pre-empt a potential and current problem doing the rounds. I honestly didn't mean to start a whole discussion on the merits of various AV apps.
Heck... if I get hit I just restore from a disk image (after having a play with what hit me). My time is only worth the £35/hr to others. To me it's all I have in this world and I wouldn't realistically bother (other than purely out of intellectual interest) spending time fixing any virus. I let my 7 PCs back themselves up on a daily basis. Much easier to restore. I only use 20-40Gb drives for each system and so that only ever takes 15 minutes or so.

[Dan Graves]

As for the a/v argument, Dan:
Well, as always, everyone has their favourites and are completely biased in their opinions.
For me, i wouldn't touch AVG with a 10ft barge pole, why? Because a system i was fixing had that installed and it did nothing to fix the problem. All it would do is say "you've got x virus/trojan/backdoor/whatever". It didn't and couldn't resolve the issue.
Uninstalled it and dropped MSE on and guess what... It removed the problem, without any sort of argument.

What you have to remember is that, like other a/v programs, MSE is one of the newer ones around. And sure it has it's bugs. Like everything else. But for what i need, it does it's job perfectly. It also has regular updates and fixes applied to it, which in my opinion is important. It's a good thing.
False positives aside (which a lot of a/v apps report), i think it's one of the better free apps out there.
Of all the a/v apps i would recommend if you want to pay for one, i would always say Kaspersky (which reported false positives a lot and also missed things that MSE has picked up on from a few MAME Roms that a friend gave me). I used that until this year when i looked into MSE and found it to be well within my expectations for an a/v program.

So while you may be right about that particular incident, Dan. I've seen the same problem occur with other viruses and such with several different a/v apps. People trust what people trust. That's never changed in the almost 20 years i've been working in IT. A bit like the argument of AMD vs Intel. Back in the day there was another CPU vendor known as Cyrix. How many of you had one of those in your machine? Once upon a time though, they were almost on par with Intel. But no one trusted them as very few had any experience with them.

In reverse order : Cyrix i am familiar with.
I have too much old hardware around here, and i'm sure there's at least 2 cyrix boxes among them...
What can i say, i like to tinker with old junk 

As for the AVS discussion...
As you rightly stated, every suite has it's issues, and has had issues.
I guess in this case, we will agree to disagree, as i had issues with MSE, and you had issues with AVG, and that is fine.