Computer virus especially the ones that comes from Indonesia usually cause a lot of havoc on your Windows system. It disables nearly every built-in utilities such as regedit, cmd, folder options, msconfig, etc in Windows that can be used to possibly remove the virus. We can remove the virus using rescue disks but after successfully remove the virus from Windows, you still end up with registry editor, command prompt, task manager, system configuration utility and folder options disabled. Antivirus software can clean and remove virus but they still haven’t came up with one click solution to fix or restore the damages on Windows operating system done by virus.

Good news is there are a lot of tools that can restore all these utilities that has been disabled by virus. One of my favorite is Remove Restriction Toool (RRT). RRT is able to easily re-enable back all the disabled Windows functions that is caused by virus. Well, the virus creators is not satisfied with the mess they create on Windows computer, so they went ahead and create a new variant of a virus that will totally mess up your folder options advanced settings.

There was a case posted in forum which the “Hide extensions for known file types” option is missing from Folder Options advanced settings in View tab. You can get there by going to Control Panel > Folder Options > View tab.
Hide extensions for known file types missing

And here is another case where the whole advanced settings options is totally corrupted. You will find options such as Gue pikir2x lo itu, Adik lo banyak, Babe lo galak, Gak punya mobil, gue ada pacar baru, Gue kangen berat, Gue masih cinta lo, Gue pandang2x lo jelek, Hidup bersama lo:, Bakalan senang, Balakan susah, Biasa aza and etc… If I am not wrong, these are Indonesia language as they are very similar with Bahasa Melayu (Malaysian language).
gue pikir2x lo itu adik lo banyak
It was hilarious when the first time I saw this but I also pity the person who got infected by the virus that causes this damage.

I didn’t know how to fix this because I have no experience with this problem. I thought the folder options advanced settings are hardcoded to Windows, but using SFC wouldn’t fix this problem. The only solution I can think of is to do a repair and hopefully it’d reset whatever the virus has modified.

Now I found an easy way to fix the folder options advanced settings without wasting an hour on repairing Windows. Everything that is displayed in folder options advanced settings can be found in registry and not hardcoded to Windows. The location is at:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\Folder

I can confirm this because I’ve tried deleting the whole Folder key and the Folder Options advanced settings went blank! When I restore back the Folder key which I backed up earlier, everything was restored back. It is not easy (unless you want to be a real geek and memorize every shell32.dll codes) to manually fix the contents in folder options advanced settings because the “Text” key uses shell32.dll with some numbers.

What you can do is simply run the registry fix that I’ve exported from a “clean” and newly installed Windows XP and Vista. The registry key will automatically delete everything in Folder key and then restore back the default folder options advanced settings. I’ve also created an EXE version of the reg fix file using Reg2EXE because you could encounter problems in importing a reg file if your registry editor is disabled. I also have carry this fix around with me in my USB flash drive.

  • Download Folder Options Advanced Settings (.reg) Registry Fix for Windows XP
  • Download Folder Options Advanced Settings (.exe) Executable Fix for Windows XP
  • Download Folder Options Advanced Settings (.reg) Registry Fix for Windows Vista
  • Download Folder Options Advanced Settings (.exe) Executable Fix for Windows Vista

    • [tags]folder, options, advanced, settings, virus[/tags]