Windows XP image preview broken

Today a friend called, asking if I had any idea why his Windows XP machine did not display any picture miniature in the "My Pictures" folder anymore. He had already tried to reset file type associations and some other experiments, but without any luck. Moreover using JPG files as desktop background did not work anymore.

After some thinking he rembered that the problem might first have occured after installing the first WMF hotfix published by Ilfak Guilfanov even before Microsoft provided a patch.

This led us to the solution. First we made sure that the patch was uninstalled by issuing the following command:

msiexec.exe /X{E1CDC5B0-7AFB-11DA-8CD6-0800200C9A66}

If it tells you, the program is not installed currently, you should be able to remove it from the "Add/Remove Software" control panel applet or by running "c:\Program Files\WindowMetafile\Fixunins000.exe".

Finally we re-registered the Windows picture and fax viewer library by issuing this commands:

regsvr32 -u %windir%\system32\shimgvw.dll
regsvr32 %windir%\system32\shimgvw.dll

This should re-enable previews and also restore the desktop background functions.

Comments

Simon said…
I don't know how exactly I lost thumbnail and preview-functionality, but re-registering the dll as described here fixed it.

Thank you so much for providing this information!
Sun Feb 04, 04:50:00 PM GMT+1
Niko said…
Thanks! Re-registering fixed the problem. I was almost loosing my nerves with this.
Tue Aug 19, 07:23:00 PM GMT+2
Aaron said…
Thanks a bunch, not sure how I lost it, but this fixed it.
Thu Sep 18, 03:08:00 AM GMT+2
Chris said…
Thank you so much for putting this online, even though it was well ahead of my problem now at the end of 2008. I have been without thumbnails for 2 weeks and finally can get more productive again. Thanks again.
Tue Oct 14, 01:26:00 PM GMT+2
Anonymous said…
LIFESAVER!

This has been driving me crazy, and I want to add for thos computer idiots like myself, restart after running the command! (by the way, I never even knew you could do such things!) Thank you Daniel for posting this blog!!!
Wed Oct 29, 06:27:00 AM GMT+1
Anonymous said…
This did the trick for me. =)
Mon Feb 23, 01:04:00 AM GMT+1
Anonymous said…
Thanks a lot ..comment just copied paste in RUN and it's solved my issue..Great!!!!!
Thu Mar 05, 01:17:00 PM GMT+1
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