Friday, September 7, 2007

"Security", "Sharing" and "Quotas" tabs missing in Windows XP

Today I came across a machine that had no "Security", no "Sharing" and no "Quotas" tab inside the Explorer for folders or drives (especially for the C: drive this is annoying).

Searching on the web for a solution just brought up the usual "You need to disable Simple folder sharing inside Folder options" that did not help at all.

Several hours of searching in very obscure forum systems and stumbling across ShellExView (http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shexview.html) finally revealed the solution: Several system DLLs were not correctly registered inside the registry and thus the tabs were missing.

Using ProcessMonitor I was able to identify the dlls that were missing and created the following batch file:

REM Security tab
regsvr32 rshx32.dll

REM Quota tab
regsvr32 dskquoui.dll

REM Offline Files
regsvr32 cscui.dll

REM Previous Versions
regsvr32 twext.dll

REM Remote Storage
regsvr32 rsshell.dll

REM Distributed File System
regsvr32 dfsshlex.dll

Please note: This simply includes all extensions (Context Menu Handler and Property Sheets) I was able to identify. Some of them might not exist on your system and thus you might get a "File not found" error.

Once this script has run inside a command shell the tabs magically appeared again.

5 comments:

  1. I've been looking for a fix for this all week, and finally found this. It worked great!

    Only tab I'm missing now (at the root level) is sharing tab. Any idea which DLL handles that? I tried to decipher it myself but...you're obviously much better at this then me. ; )

    Thanks!

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  2. No sorry, I have no idea what DLL that might be. The computer that showed this error had the Sharing tab on the root level, but not on any other folder.

    However, you can still use the Computer Management MMC Console (compmgmt.msc) to change root level sharing.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thank you so much! You saved my life!

    ReplyDelete
  4. To get the Sharing TAB to show up, the answer is on this site: http://forums.cnet.com/5208-6142_102-0.html?threadID=304919

    ReplyDelete
  5. Dude, great fix! I ran into the same problem on a few clients of mine. Never found a fix for it untill now.

    Many thnxs!

    ReplyDelete