I reinstalled Win XP today and just spent the last half hour or more trying to figure out why Windows Explorer wasn’t refreshing automatically whenever I created, renamed or deleted anything (so I had to press F5 a lot). Most of the things I found on the internet were about network shares, but this was happening locally.
Turns out the script I wrote to change all of my My Documents, Pictures, etc. locations to another drive was the culprit. Very subtle mistake… I set the My Documents location to “D:” instead of “d:\”. (Not sure if it’s the capitalisation or trailing \ but that seems to have been all it was!)
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders\Personal HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders\Personal
Or just right-click My Documents > Properties.