Floppy access with My Computer virtual folder - Really annoying...

I have a virtual folder that points to My Computer. The floppy drive is listed in this folder, of course.

The problem is that every single time I acess the folder, the floppy drive is accessed. This is not good for the drive (when done many times a day), and it is annoying, especially when there is no disk in the floppy drive.

Is there any way for me to prevent the floppy drive from being accessed in this way?

Hiding the floppy drive does not help, and enabling the "Do not expand" option on it doesn't either.

One option that might help:

Go to the "Other options" tab on your TLB Settings dialog box and make sure the option "Use background load for Virtual Folders" is NOT checked.

Thank you very much for the advice, but unfortunately disabling the "Use background load for Virtual Folders" option didn't change anything--the floppy drive is still accessed when I initially open the menu.

How often does your "My Computer" folder change? I've spent a little time creating my own using plugins and virtual folders that TLB provides, and I can't remember the last time I changed it!

It's not the same though. Even with the "Expand shortcuts to folders" option enabled, my drive shortcuts are just... shortcuts. Not what I want; I want cascading menus.

I check the Do not expand option in the shell menu as I don't like cascading drives. However, in this screen shot you'll see that my drives do cascade when I uncheck the Do not expand option.

The "Downloads" thing you show is a directory, not a drive, correct? If you create a shortcut to a drive, I don't think it will expand. Only a shortcut to a directory will expand. At least that's what I'm seeing here. And I don't want a bunch of shortcuts to directories... I want the top level to be the drives themselves.

You can create virtual folders to disks

Oh great, so I only have to create 13 separate virtual directories. Guess I better get to it...

Edit: OK, correction, I had to create 14 virtual folders, and a bunch of titles. But it was worth it: The new menu works better. The strange thing is that while it looks and works the same as the standard My Computer menu, the floppy drive is not accesed when I open it. I don't get it.

So, to clarify for others who might be reading this thread because they had this same problem: Just delete the "My Computer" virtual folder. Then right click the TLB area, and create a new menu. Name it "My Computer". This will of course be an empty menu, which you will then fill up with virtual folders of your choice... but the most-obvious choice is virtual folders that point to drives. Sorry if this is over-explaining, I'm tired...

Found what might be a bug in TLB after creating this new menu. Some of my virtual folders pointed to BestCrypt volumes, which are basically drive letters that can be added or removed from the system at any time. If a volume is mounted and then dismounted, TLB still displays some of its folders (which may be a separate issue in and of itself). But try to manipulate the parent folder or the menu at that point, and Explorer crashes. It seems that TLB does not account for the fact that some drives may exist at one point, and then disappear. Or maybe Explorer itself...?

I've found the bug: menu show folder content after dismounting. But I cannot reproduce explorer crash. Please give steps how to reproduce this?

1) Have a virtual folder that opens a drive which can be dismounted (such as a BestCrypt drive, in my case). With the drive mounted, the virtual folder works fine.

2) Dismount the drive.

3) Perform an operation on the virtual folder which points to the drive that was just dismounted. It may be enough to expand the virtual folder menu to a subfolder of the (now non-existent) drive, and right click that subfolder in the menu, and select Properties (or Open in Explorer). The crash may occur the moment you right click as well.

That was how I reproduced the crash two or three times.

I use Daemon Tools to mount ISO images as virtual CD-ROMs, and do not have any of these issues. Everything works as you would expect a real piece of hardware to behave.

Please don't think I'm being disrespectful when I say this, but perhaps BestCrypt isn't cleanly interfacing with Windows' drive APIs?

Hah, no disrespect taken. I'm not a BestCrypt developer.

BestCrypt does do some strange things, but I really don't think that in this case, BestCrypt is at fault. Rather, I think it has to do with the fact that TLB thinks a file system object is there, when it really is not, and doesn't handle it gracefully when it tries to perform an operation on it. This is just a guess, based on what I see, and experience. I could be wrong, of course.

Maybe the difference between how your virtual CD-ROMs behave and how my BestCrypt volumes behave has to do with the fact that fixed drives are handled differently (in general) than removable drives. I am not sure. I can say that I also have removable and virtual-removable drives, and I cannot reproduce the Explorer crash with them--even if I take the same steps I outlined above.

Thank you Scott. I've reproduced all with BestCrypt. In the next version this bug will be fixed.