hi, this is my first post in these forums. first off i am a registered user although a new one (6 wks.) anyway, the short version of the prob is this. when attempting to create 4 subcategories for my media category, the crazy thing kept one sub together okay but then nuked the other three (one of which was a tools subcategory that had a few dozen entries and its gonna be a real pain and very time consuming to rebuild them manually!) it just totally emptied them. since this tool does such a simple job i sure didn't see this one coming. now here's the real kicker, the categories in my menu restore point are empty just like the ones it nuked. gentlemen, this really blows. i am not using a beta release so i am assuming NS 9.05.0504 with start menu organizer pro 1.1 is considered stable? what the heck happened? i really don't think i want to trust the stupid thing anymore, not so good for paid software.

oops forgot to mention i am using vista sp1, online armor 3.5.0.27 with avira premium 9.0. no other hips or sandboxing.

When you run the Start Menu Organizer for the first time, and before you make any changes, it automatically creates a full backup of your Start Menu structure (this includes folders and shortcuts) called 'Initial Start Menu Backup'.

Have you already tried restoring from it?

yep, it would appear that the backup is somehow broken, when it refreshes i end up with something very different than what i started with. for example some of the new categories are appearing in the backup (???) and the contents of the corresponding folders are still missing. almost like it was trying to sync or something? moreover, the view that the app shows me is quite different than the explorer view (all users) of the start menu, phantom folders, folders appearing in different locations than they actually are, etc. i should also mention there are only two accts on this machine, the default admin and the super admin accts. i'm glad it only nailed three sub folders...probably about 60 - 80 shortcuts. could have been a lot worse.
everything seemed to be going okay with it until i decided i wanted to break my media category up into four subcategories - cd-dvd, tools, players, web. well when i applied my changes and it refreshed, tools, players and web were empty - tools was pretty darned big and a bunch of that stuff had command line switches too, ouch.
my impressions of winstep so far are basically good. it has some bugs yet but then look at the platform its running on haha - gotta love redmond. but i will add that often things do seem kinda beta-ish.
as far as start menu organizer pro goes, for the time being i think i'll either stick with explorer for start menu management or at the very least make my own physical backups before i use this thing again. i'd definitely feel better about it if i knew what the heck was going on.

Me too.

But something is fishy when you say a restore of the initial backup doesn't do it. You know why?

Because if you rename the extensions of the two backup files (.WsOrganizer and .WsOrganizerUser) to .zip, that is exactly what you get: two zip compressed files holding the contents (folders and shortcuts) of the Current User Start Menu and the All Users Start Menu (I assume you know what I am talking about).

When you restore, the Organizer nukes the original content and replaces them with whatever is in those zip by simply uncompressing the folder structure and shortcuts inside the backup files! There is no dark magic, it's a very simple unzip process, which means you should end up with whatever you started with.

If you don't, then something was not right to begin with.

Go to your My Documents folder, double click on the shortcut to the Winstep user data folder, and then open the Backup folder. You should find two Organizer backup files there: Initial Start Menu Backup.WsOrganizer and Initial Start Menu Backup.WsOrganizerUser.

Make a copy of those two files to be on the safe side, rename their extension to .zip and start browsing them. All your original Start Menu content should be there, and, if it isn't, then something was wrong even before you run the Organizer for the first time.

If you want, you can also send me the two backup files to the Winstep support address and I will have a look at them.

Of course, it could also be that you first run the Organizer using one account (e.g. Admin) and are now trying to restore (or previously restored) using another account (e.g. super admin).

Can you please confirm that? That would explain a lot.

hi, what you say makes complete sense to me and as i said in my initial post this thing does a really simple task and its hard to see how it could get all convoluted. winstep is a really slick interface and runs pretty solid most of the time. truth be known, so far it hasn't had nearly as many "moments" as explorer. its obvious you guys know how to code pretty well which made the prob even more bewildering.
i did as you suggested and the .WsOrganizerUser file would seem to be the culprit, it looks a lot like it did when it went kaboom. i can understand now why the program was doing what it was doing, the thing that bothers me though is that i've never used winstep under any other profile (i only very rarely use the super admin acct and i keep it really bare bones in terms of the interface.) although i think i may have goofed when i installed winstep for all users even though i didn't need to. one of my tard moments.
so then, if i were to copy the .WSOrganizer file to the .WSOrganizerUser file it should straighten out the backups? i think i'll give it a shot, nothing to lose.
i have rebuilt and this time backed up my start menu so i think i'm ready for most contingencies. think i'll start smop and see what happens. thanks for your replies and i will keep this updated if i have any epiphanies.

Nah, that is not a problem.




No!!! The first file holds Start Menu shortcuts for All Users, the second file holds Start Menu shortcuts for the user you were logged in as when you run the Start Menu Organizer for the first time.



Thanks, please do.

hmmm... that might be a prob if i had ever ran or intended to run it under another profile but honest, i have not...seriously. i was even wondering if maybe my woman might have started the machine and accidently logged into the super admin acct but she wouldn't have known the password or for that matter known to start winstep (i do not have it start with windoze.) as it sits i can't use it anyway(smop.) fussing with it seems like much ado over nothing as explorer can do the same job natively. i like eye candy, new tools and stuff just as well as the next person but not at the cost of usability.

two other issues i would like to ask about concerning workshelf and the weather module database (not show stoppers, just annoyances.) i will do so in dedicated threads. thanks.

True, there's potential for trouble there. For the next release of the SMO I'll give the user backup file a account related name, or perhaps store it in a user folder instead of a shared folder.

This said, have you tried already renaming the .WsOrganizerUser file to .zip and looking at the contents?

indeed i have - see above. the contents of the .WsOrganizerUser file do not match my windows start menu configuration on either acct there are only 2. could somebody please explain how this could be? time and date stamps (date modified) were identical on both files i'm getting a headache just thinking about it. anyway its cool, i'll just use exploder for now thanks. i'll check smo out again on the next build.