[SOLVED] Changing default folder names changes them all

Starcruiser

Honorable
A friend I'm helping migrate his OS to an SSD is having a problem that has completely stumped me. The OS migration is successful, but during the process when I was guiding him through moving his user folders to the D: drive before the migration he accidentally set the paths of his Downloads, Desktop, Music, and Documents to the same location.

I've corrected the issue where fixing one folder path (for example, correcting D:\ to D:\Desktop) sets all of the mistake folders to the same path still using the registry.

The issue now is that all of those mistake folders are still named the same for some reason. If the name is changed through desktop.ini then all of the desktop.ini will be changed to the same name still. Even deleting all of the desktop.ini to allow it to rebuild hasn't worked, deleting one deletes them all even though they're definitely in different folders now.

I'm stumped. We've even tried a PC refresh to no effect.
 
Solution
Create new folders. Move the CONTENTS of the old folders to the new ones. Use different names than the original folders for the new folders. After moving the contents of all folders to the new folders, delete the old folders. Then correct the path for each library as needed in it's properties or shortcut in libraries.

If that fails to work, you may need to do a clean install of Windows as you may have an unfixable registry corruption. But even doing a clean install will likely require you to perform the above process since those folders are on a different drive than the operating system.

Create new folders. Move the CONTENTS of the old folders to the new ones. Use different names than the original folders for the new folders. After moving the contents of all folders to the new folders, delete the old folders. Then correct the path for each library as needed in it's properties or shortcut in libraries.

If that fails to work, you may need to do a clean install of Windows as you may have an unfixable registry corruption. But even doing a clean install will likely require you to perform the above process since those folders are on a different drive than the operating system.

 
Solution