When in Windows Explorer I have opened the My Pictures folder which contains a few hundred digital photos. I select the “View” menu > “Thumbnails” but the thumbnails for the photos do not appear. I have had a look through the different menus but cannot find anything that is stopping us from viewing the thumbnails. The computer is running Windows XP.

From your description of the problem I assume that instead of the thumbnails appearing for the digital photos only a generic icon appears in the space that the thumbnail would usually occupy. First, we will check whether the thumbnail cache for the folder containing the digital photos has become corrupt. The first time you view a folder containing images through thumbnail view Windows needs to generate the thumbnails. As this is a time consuming process Windows caches the thumbnails so that on future occasions when that folder is viewed the thumbnails do not need to be re-generated, but instead can just be read directly from the thumbnail cache file. However, if the thumbnail cache has become corrupted this could be causing problems when displaying the thumbnails. In the folder containing the digital photos, go to the “Tools” menu > “Folder Options”. In the Folder Options window that appears, tick the option “Do not cache thumbnails”. This will disable the thumbnail cache, allowing us to delete the current cache and have it re-generated. Also, enable the option “Show hidden files and folders”. This will allow us to see the hidden thumbnail cache file so it can be removed. Click OK. Back in the folder you should now see a file named “Thumbs.db” being the thumbnail cache file. Select and delete this file. Once this has been done, go back into the Folder Options and disable “Do not cache thumbnails” and enable “Do not show hidden files and folders”. Now refresh the folder and check whether the thumbnails start re-generating.

Should this not fix the problem the next possibility is something wrong with Windows that is preventing the generation and/or display of the thumbnail images. There is an article on Microsoft Knowledge Base (support.microsoft.com/kb/243401) relating to Windows 2000 not displaying the thumbnails for JPEG images, due to the removal of a utility included in Office 97. Even though this article relates to Windows 2000 and Office 97 some users have reported that it is applicable to their Windows XP systems and has fixed the problem. As such, have a look at the article and try working through the steps to see whether it helps in resolving your problem. However, if you find that the steps do not match your installation of Windows (such as not having the correct registry keys) then it obviously does not fit and you should not continue – don’t go creating new registry keys to “make” your system fit with the instructions. If it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t fit.

If you still have problems there are a few Windows system files which you could attempt to re-register (i.e. re-link) with Windows. These files are involved in the creation of the thumbnails, so by re-registering the files it should hopefully help with the problem. Go to the “Start” menu > “Run” and type the following command: regsvr32 shimgvw.dll (if this command does not work, try the following command instead: regsvr32 %windir%\system32\shimgvw.dll). Once that command has successfully executed repeat this procedure for the following two commands: regsvr32 /i shell32.dll and regsvr32 /i mshtml.dll . After these have been executed, check whether the problem continues.