For quite some time now, clicking on either the "Control Panel" or "My Network Places" icons present in the Start menu take me directly to My Computer, rather than OPENING the correct "FOLDER." I put folder in quotes, because I know that Control Panel is not a real folder, but rather a viewer used for items with the CPL control panel extension.

Let me say that if I GO directly to control.exe and double click it, the control panel works just fine. But if I click the Control Panel link on the Start menu, it just opens up My Computer. I came up with a partial solution simply by changing Control Panel to display as a menu rather than a link via the Taskbar and Start Menu properties dialogue box. However, if I want to access something on the Control Panel menu which has its own sub menu--for instance Printers and Faxes--trying to open the Printers and Faxes menu once again opens the My Computer window.

In Folder Options, I have Control Panel Extensions to open with C:\WINDOWS\rundll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL %1,%* which I believe is correct. Changing this to control.exe does not work.

Does ANYONE have any idea how to fix this? Thanks!When did the problem start?

Any recent changes? (downloads, installs, hardware changes)Well, I was fooling around in the "folder options" and really messed up a bunch of things. Eventually, I re-installed Windows XP, which fixed most of my problems, but this one remains.

(Gosh, I hate saying how stupid I was!!) Was it clean install?No, I used the Dell disk to re-install XP over top of the existing set-up. Everything else was fixed, just this problem with Control Panel, etc. remains. My other folder problems were fixed. APPARENTLY, if you even LOOK at the folder options, Windows will re-set Windows Explorer to open folders in "search" mode instead of just opening them. The more I tried to fix it, the worse things got. Eventually, I had to do the re-install.The only sure way to make your Windows to work correctly is clean install: http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/cleanxpinstall.html