Folder appears at startup

[Capmaster]

My son is running Win2K, a recent installation. He installed his ATI card and now every time he starts Windows a folder appears on his desktop as a window. The path is c:\program files\ATI\Support.

There is nothing in the startup folder causing this, and I couldn't find an instance of that path using a search in Regedit.

I used to know how to remove it in Win98, but it was a long time ago. Forum search here didn't show me a post I seem to remember about this. I also did a search at NT Registry Tips & Hacks and I was overwhelmed by the volume of hits I got.

Anyone have a clue how I can remove this damn folder from his desktop?

[rallynavvie]

Easy, get rid of the card :P

Sounds like something may be accessing it on shutdown which is causing it to reappear on boot. I bet there's something in the driver settings that could be the problem.

[Capmaster]

Solved. It resulted from an incompletely installed ATI control panel applet that was in the registry under "Run". If a gegistry key has a bad path or invalid characters it can cause the folder to appear like that.

I removed the applet call and it boots now without the folder 8)

Thanks for the help

[dobbin_uk]

Cap,

You could just delete the folder. This would do away with your problem. However, what ever process is trying to open the folder would probably still run on startup (although with no consequence). Did your son change the installation path when running the ATI installation program? Perhaps the program coding isn't so good and the location is hardcoded within it. Before trying anything else, I'd download the official catalyst uninstaller tool, boot up in safe mode, deinstall the drivers, run the tool you just downloaded, use the default vga drivers and then reboot and reinstall the ATI drivers using the default paths. If that doesn't cure the problem, repost and we'll investigate it further.

Regards,
Lee.

[dobbin_uk]

Or you could do what you already did. So that google search did work then?

Regards,
Lee.

[Capmaster]

Or you could do what you already did. So that google search did work then?

Regards,
Lee.

I don't know exactly what happened when he installed it, but looking through the Microsoft Knowledge Base I found the reference to it, but it referred to System32 folders appearing on startup. Same problem, and basically what they said is a botched installation could leave registry values in the Run key pointing to non-existent paths. That's what this did.

The forum search here for ATI startup folders yielded nothing, so I went to Microsoft and started poking around there. It paid off this time

Thanks for the help Lee