I discovered on unusual bug/feature in Vista.
Most of the times it is not possible to “select all” (CTRL+A, etc etc) the files or folders in some directories. Which makes copying a royal pain in the PEEP.

Some other symptoms are:

  • Select All option in Edit menu is disabled (greyed-out)
  • Mouse highlight over and drag does not work.

Of course I searched the internet looking for people that were having the same problem. There were some suggestions to do a Reset on the folders but that didn’t work for me.

Then I found someone that made a modification to the registry which works. :)

  1. Open Regedit
  2. Navigate to HKCU\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\
  3. Delete the Bags & BagMRU keys

Windows Explorer should be its normal self again.

Hope this helps.