External USB drives show up twice in Windows Explorer

It is really annoying. I don’t know this to be entirely safe, so proceed at your own risk… but it seems you can change this behavior with the registry keys named {F5FB2C77-0E2F-4A16-A381-3E560C68BC83} in these two locations:

  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Desktop\NameSpace\DelegateFolders\
  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Desktop\NameSpace\DelegateFolders

Supposedly you can just delete them (but I renamed them to {F5FB2C77-0E2F-4A16-A381-3E560C68BC83}.disabled). Maybe I’ll find I want them back sometime and deleting seems so final…