Windows 7: Working With Images Leading to FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUU

WindowsOne of the issues which has annoyed me about Windows 7 for a while now has, since I started writing this blog, moved on from being an annoyance to being seriously aggravating. It’s a meme I don’t really like but it does perfectly convey my emotions;

FFFFFFUUUUUUUU

Emotions prompted by this error message;

File In Use

All I’ve done is create a sub-folder for a blog post under my Not Posted folder, created some screenshots, renamed them, uploaded the ones I want to use and tried to delete the folder the remainder are in.

Well, today is a Bank Holiday and it’s hit me again and I decided I had the time to fix the problem. And, actually, it is quite a simple fix. Open the Group Policy Editor, navigate to Local Computer Policy » User Configuration » Administrative Templates » Windows Components » Windows Explorer and locate the setting Turn off the caching of thumbnails in hidden thumbs.db files;

Group Policy Editor

Enable this setting;

Turn off the caching of thumbnails in hidden thumbs.db files

The thumbnail caching in the hidden thumbs.db files is now disabled;

Group Policy Editor

My understanding is that Windows 7 has a centralised thumbnail cache and the hidden thumbs.db was retained for legacy applications, so turning it off should have no impact on the system in general. I’ve done a little testing and everything does seem the same as before; better in fact as I can now delete folders without seeing the error message.

Also, one thing to keep in mind is that this is only possible on systems which contain the Group Policy Editor and therefore will not work on the Home or Starter editions of Windows 7.

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