Help! The ridiculous folders are back; old regedit tricks don't work

Ugh. Thought I had this solved back in Win 10, and again with win 11 with various reg edits people made to get rid of the bloated cluttered folders Windows insists on stacking on the nav pane in file explorer.

Latest win update to Win 11 Pro 22H2 build 22621.1555 experience pack 1000.22640.1000.0 and now it's all been redesigned, everything is jammed under a duplicated Desktop entry at the top which has it's own Desktop subfolder, quick access is gone and now it's buried under a nested Home folder, and all those worthless folders I never use and never will are back: Libraries, Videos, Music, Pictures, Downloads, Documents, etc.

Does anyone know how to get rid of them? The old regedit tricks for removing them from my PC don't remove them from this new Desktop folder, and if you fold it up, everything gets folded up, including My PC where your drives are located.

And if that wasn't bad enough, it's the same in all of the file Open and Save dialogues, making it harder to rapidly access your drives and folders.

Please help!

No need for any reg edits. Click the three dots at the top in Explorer and go to Options. Unchecking the three boxes at the bottom will reduce what you call clutter and you can get rid of most of the rest by right clicking them and selecting Unpin from Quick Access.

Hello @VanGogh66 and welcome to ElevenForum.

I believe you have to remove the Home folder as well. I'm on the same Win 11 version and mine are still gone.









Here's some of the most commonly requested tweaks...





Mainly, I've removed the individual folders, the quick access, and the Home folder at various times, since October 2021.
Adding to what @fixer said, I also have these unchecked, in Options...
But I don't know whether I unchecked them or the registry edits did.

fixer said:

No need for any reg edits. Click the three dots at the top in Explorer and go to Options. Unchecking the three boxes at the bottom will reduce what you call clutter and you can get rid of most of the rest by right clicking them and selecting Unpin from Quick Access.

Click to expand...

Thank you for making me go back to that dialogue box. I had already checked the view options menu (of course), and had tried unchecking things but they made no difference. The only one I had left alone was "Show All Folders" which I thought was for something else. Unchecking that fixed almost everything and gave me back quick access at the top with My PC for drive/folders at the bottom. I wish it didn't get rid of the trash can in File explorer, but beggars can't be choosers, and maybe there's a fix for that. It did make the option to remove Libraries work, which previously did nothing.

The only thing it failed to do was to remove Home from the very top, which was useless and served no purpose. But thanks to @Ghot I ran the home remove option 1 regedit and bam, I'm back to streamlined.

One minor issue was Trash and Desktop were gone entirely, so I had to manually add a shortcut to them to quick access from the desktop trash icon and from users/username/desktop, and that has one bit of odd behavior. If I click on either one in quick access, it makes them appear and persist again down at the very bottom, but only for that session of file explorer. I can live with that.

One other oddity is the way I have file explorer opening directly to my c: drive means that the Options menu isn't present under the three dots. I have to click on a folder first because being open to the c: drive means the dialogue menu under the three dots only provides properties for the drive. Again, I can live with that.

Now I just wish I could get rid of all the icons at the top I'll never use. They're just a waste of space. I bet there's a regedit for that somewhere. Tabs I might use, we'll see.

But long and short: thank you guys! All those old tutorials on google for fixing this issue were of no use, but you were.

Clutter free in 2023!

Cheers.

@VanGogh66





You need to play around with the File Explorer settings.
Sort of like finding all the things to click on, at an Amazon web page.

Ghot said:

@VanGogh66


View attachment 58541


You need to play around with the File Explorer settings.
Sort of like finding all the things to click on, at an Amazon web page.

Click to expand...

Yeah know about that option but I don't want My PC. I want it to open on C: drive with all folders listed. My PC makes you waste a click every time to open the drive.

For that I use a shortcut to explorer.exe with "C:\" as the argument, and pin the shortcut to the taskbar. Works great. Most of the time I use that same technique but set it to a subfolder "C:\All files," but lately I've been doing some things in the the root of C drive.

Cheers.

VanGogh66 said:

Yeah know about that option but I don't want My PC. I want it to open on C: drive with all folders listed. My PC makes you waste a click every time to open the drive.

For that I use a shortcut to explorer.exe with "C:\" as the argument, and pin the shortcut to the taskbar. Works great. Most of the time I use that same technique but set it to a subfolder "C:\All files," but lately I've been doing some things in the the root of C drive.

Cheers.

Click to expand...

I try to use the C:\ drive as little as possible, since Windows lives there.
I have my games and lesser programs installed on my F: drive.

So I like File Explorer opening on ThisPC.

Ghot said:

@VanGogh66


View attachment 58541


You need to play around with the File Explorer settings.
Sort of like finding all the things to click on, at an Amazon web page.

Click to expand...

Yeah know about that option but I don't want My PC. I want it to open on C: drive with all folders listed. M PC makes you waste a click every time to open C: and show it's contents. I use a shortcut for that.

Cheers.

Ghot said:

I try to use the C:\ drive as little as possible, since Windows lives there.
I have my games and lesser programs installed on my F: drive.

So I like File Explorer opening on ThisPC.

Click to expand...

You could use the same trick to open your F: drive and save yourself a step. That's what I do on my desktop. The explorer icon on my start bar opens directly to my D:\All Files folder, fully expanded and ready to work with no extra clicks to get there.

But for my surface laptop I decided the extra partition is meaningless because all my files are routinely synced/backed-up to my desktop D drive, and I'm savy enough that working on C is actually easier as a dev running nvm, npm, node, git, and many other services and programs that default or preferentially run on C. It's just extra work toggling between partitions, so why bother? These days Windows also prompts when you do just about anything it thinks may be destructive.

Cheers.

VanGogh66 said:

You could use the same trick to open your F: drive and save yourself a step

Click to expand...

I know. But I also have other drives that I use just as much, which is why I set it to ThisPC.

This thread made me realise I've never given Explorer much thought at all. I've always been able to get to where I want easily and have simply been ignoring the top half of the Nav pane completely. Must admit, now I've reduced it to just This PC and Network, it looks a whole lot tidier. The only disappointment is being unable to remove the Quick Access heading in Win 10, even though it's empty. Anyone have the answer to that?

fixer said:

This thread made me realise I've never given Explorer much thought at all. I've always been able to get to where I want easily and have simply been ignoring the top half of the Nav pane completely. Must admit, now I've reduced it to just This PC and Network, it looks a whole lot tidier. The only disappointment is being unable to remove the Quick Access heading in Win 10, even though it's empty. Anyone have the answer to that?

Click to expand...

I was skeptical of quick access at first, but it proved to save me a ton of time. As new projects migrate to the top of my workflow, a pin in QA saves boatloads of clicks. But I can relate to wanting to customize exactly the way you like it. MS should just make all areas removable.

Cheers.