Fix for Partially Broken Aero Peek

How did we ever use Windows before the taskbar Aero peek? Rolling your mouse across the taskbar and having the previews is an amazing productivity enhancement. On one of my machines aero peek was partially broken. Using ALT+TAB showed aero peek, but rolling the mouse across the taskbar no longer showed the thumbnail preview or the peek. Running the Aero troubleshooter reported no problems and neither logging out or logging back in fixed it. Obviously, there was some registry setting that was corrupted or wrong.

All the internet searches about Aero peek problems seemed to be that it was an all or nothing problem. My case was weird as it was partially working. I remembered back in the Vista days having all sorts of problems with Explorer losing settings or corrupting views. Floating around in my utility directory was a batch file called FixVistaFolderViews.cmd that I used to run whenever Explorer seemed to be messed up. I figured it couldn’t hurt to run that file and was shocked to see that it fixed the problem. It’s nice to know Microsoft still hasn’t fixed all the Explorer problems from Vista.

I have no idea where I got the batch file, but the top Google hit is Duncan Smart, so I’ll give him credit.

Here’s the batch file:

setlocal

set BASE_KEY=HKCUSoftwareClassesLocal SettingsSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsShell

:: Delete cached folder views

reg delete “%BASE_KEY%Bags” /f

reg delete “%BASE_KEY%BagMRU” /f

:: Set default folder template

reg add “%BASE_KEY%BagsAllFoldersShell” /v FolderType /d NotSpecified

:: Restart Explorer

taskkill /f /im explorer.exe

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p style=”line-height:13pt;background-color:#c6d9f1;margin:0in 0in 0pt” class=”Code”>start explorer.exe