Suddenly, with no warning given in the form of any prior trouble or weirdness, I find that I can’t drag files or folders and drop them into another folder. I can’t even drag a file/folder onto the Recycle Bin. This problem occurs whether I’m dragging between two folders or within one folder. It makes no difference whether I’m viewing things as icons, tiles, list, etc.
I still can copy and paste in the usual way (and, in fact, that’s how I’ve been moving things around since the problem first manifested.)
I’ve searched the SDMB and found nothing of relevance. I’ve googled and yahoo’d as well and, although, there are a lot of hits, nothing in them has proved of use to me. It’s actually reassuring to see how many pages there are out there in cyberspace describing the same or similar problem to what I’m experiencing. So, I’m clearly not alone in this. If only one of those pages actually helped . . .
So, any ideas? How can I get back the ability to “drag and drop”? It’s a pain not having it. Like so many things, you take it for granted until it’s gone.
One site suggested that all that was needed was to toggle my ‘Esc’ key (and had several follow up letters testifying to the effectivenss of that approach). So, I tried it. No dice.
I rebooted, twice. No luck.
I went back to a ‘restore point’ which I knew corresponded to a time well before my ‘problem’. Nope, didn’t work.
A couple of sites gave custom designed code to use to change registry settings. Not knowing how to fix a problem if I caused one by using said code, and not feeling nearly confident enough to screw with the registry in any case, I passed on those suggestions.
Several sites emphasized the importance of enabling the ‘drag and drop’ function. Been there, done that. No work.
One site told me to disable my touchpad. No. No luck.
I’m sure there were more, but I’ve forgotten and I’m not about to redo my search efforts at this hour.
So, as you can see, I’ve not just been sitting on my ass waiting for the problem to go away on its own. I’ve searched for suggestions and tried most of them.
Normally I’d shy away from telling uncomfortable users to do this, but I feel that in this annoying of a case using the registry is really no more complicated than using windows explorer and editing text files. It’s actually pretty hard to screw up unless you decide to mess with things they don’t tell you to, just double check what you type in.
However if memory serves this may work:
Right click on the toolbar -> properties -> start menu -> customize -> advanced -> enable drag and drop.
I can’t recall if that only effects the start menu or not though, you’d think so but sometimes windows properties do weird things.
I ran into this little program/applet the other day in de-lousing my daughter’s infected notebook. The nasty malware(s) she had contracted changed lots of permissions settings in the registry in an attempt to block anti-virus program installs (ie made the C: drive invisible and other nastiness) . I finally crippled it enough to remove it, but this permission program was neat because it returned the permissions to the original state they would be after a fresh OS install.
If some permission to prevent drag and drop has be inadvertently changed this will reset it to the virgin fresh install state. If you have special permissions etc. you have set on your PC you will have to re-initialize them after running this.
I wasn’t suggesting you were sitting on your ass, it just helps to know what has already been eliminated. Sort of like a doctor takes a history before making a diagnosis.
Download and run the registry file on the right side of line 233 here and see what happens.
I had this problem on my computer at work a couple years ago. Apparently a recent patch or update had horked up Internet Explorer, which of course has its grubby little fingers all over the rest of Windows. I had to reinstall IE and everything worked fine after that.