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
Thank you so much for providing this information!
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!!!