Win 7 Devices and Printers folder is empty-- often power cycling the workstation cures it.
I have been working around the empty Devices and Printers problem for over two years now-- first with Vista ( I moved to a clean install of 7 after a month because this problem showed up). Here's what I have found... We are a tree in an AD forest, and none of the other trees seem to have the problem. It has shown up at different times on a dozen or so computers in our domain, and comes and goes. I have tried all the usual fixes (Bluetooth, reregistering DLLs, rebooting in Safe Mode, etc). What I have found is that it only happens on bootup, and often just powering down then booting up again ( not just a restart) without making any other changes fixes it for the day. Restarting in safe mode then restarting in normal mode has a good chance of curing it for a longer time. If it goes dormant (and I have had it go dormant for months at a time) and then reappears, it is most likely to come back on the Wednesday after a Patch Tuesday. Because a power cycle makes it go away, just about anything you do to the computer will "fix it". I tried to use msconfig to isolate a cause, and had tracked it (I thought) to our AV client (Sophos). I could set the Sophos services to manual start and the problem went away for a while. Until we changed AV vendors to Kaspersky and it started back again ( in its usual intermittent, hit or miss behavior). I ran procmon (Process Monitor) with boot logging enabled to try to see what was happening, but could not see when in the boot process the popuation of the folder occurs, and have not had the time or desire to analyze and compare boot logs ( I have several from a while back if anyone wants to dig in...) SO: What I would really like to know is HOW the Devices and Printers information gets put into that folder. The information has to be read from somewhere-- from a folder or from a registry key-- or by a process that discovers them all and assembles the information into the Devices and Printers folder (or something else unknown). If we knew what process or folder or registry key to monitor maybe we could get past this collection of " try this it worked for me" solutions and figure out what is going on here. I have yet to find someone who deeply understands how this information is stored and displayed who will share that knowlege. I will retire at the end of May and I will not care after that, so will someone escalate this thing all the way to the programmers who wrote it if needed to figure out what is going on. This is a request for information and for escalation by Microsoft to discover what the actual mechanism for the Devices and Printers problem is. This problem should have been solved ( not a workaround) long before now. Gary
April 30th, 2012 6:07pm

Hi Gary, You can try the suggestions in this thread: Devices and Printers empty - bad device experience If the issue persists, use the System File Checker tool to check the result. Hope this helps. Vincent Wang TechNet Community Support
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May 2nd, 2012 5:47am

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