Accidental mass deletions

About five times, I have had the following thing happen. In the past this has occurred less than once a year on average, but I've just had it happen twice in the space of about ten hours. I have had the problem in both XP (all service packs or lack thereof) and Vista (SP1).

I have Windows Explorer open with the Folders list on the left. I am cleaning out a folder, call it Foo, in which I still want some of the individual files but not others. In the course of doing this I've been using the Folders view to move a lot of files to different folders - nowhere near Foo in my directory structure, and sometimes on a completely different drive. Though Foo is showing in the main part of the window throughout, at no time is Foo selected in the Folders pane. I click on a file I want to delete, hold down Shift (the whole point is usually to free up disc space) and either press the delete key or right-click and choose Delete - and Windows decides I wanted to delete the entire Foo folder, despite it never being selected in either pane of Explorer.

In Vista, at least I can usually get it to stop halfway through the process. In XP, if you did this you were basically screwed unless you had an undeletion utility handy. At any rate, for this reason I [do always have an undeletion utility handy, so I haven't lost much permanently of late, but this is extremely annoying and time-consuming to deal with.

What causes this, is there any way to know it's going to happen before it's too late, and is there a way to be certain of avoiding it?

Hi Jeff, If you have this problem all the time, stop holding down the shift key when you click delete, then whatever you are deleting goes into the Recycle Bin in my experience. If you make a mistake, then you can retrieve it later on from the RB. Best regards,

When you shift/delete a file or folder, you get a prompt asking if your sure you want to delete xyz (or Foo in your case). Why not read the prompt instead of automatically hitting Yes? That way when this happens you can click on No. I know bad habits are harder to break than good ones but this one is very bad and is something only you can correct.

I realize there are things I can do to correct this. But you're right about habits being hard to break, especially when it's something that you do hundreds or even thousands of times without any problem. I have done something like 300 file operations of this sort this week alone and only two have had this kind of potentially disastrous result, and I would say even that 0.666…% error rate is unusually high for me. The most important (at least to me) part of my question, though, is what, under the circumstances I described, could cause this in the first place. How does Windows come to think I've selected an entire folder and/or its whole contents when there's no way I could have done that with the resources visible on the screen even if I'd wanted to?

I do make the occasional simple error of clicking on the wrong thing (I would say about 10 times as often as I have the very specific problem I described). I usually know that's happened, and how, within a few seconds of doing it. This problem, though, seems to be something quite different from the problems caused by simple butterfingers on my own part.

EDIT: By the way, in Vista, after about every second file operation, and sometimes after so much as opening and closing a file, Windows does…. something (re-index the folder, maybe?)…. that slows down my computer immensely for a few seconds to a minute. I can tell it's happening because the address bar at the top of the Explorer window becomes an orange progress bar; it's also accompanied by an audible increase in disc activity. During this time, anything else I try to do slows down drastically - Movies become choppy, clicks may or may not register, etc. The duration usually seems correlated to the number of files in the folder I have open, but not always - it took almost 30 seconds on a folder with just two files in it once (though both were large video files). What is this and is there a way to get Vista to knock it off or at least do it less often? It's very annoying.

EDIT 2: For that matter, and I realize this is getting more and more tangential to the original questions, but file operations in general seem much more time-consuming and much less stable than in XP. Deleting a single file used to be nearly instantaneous and have no noticeable effect on other running processes, now it can take several seconds and cause a very noticeable slowdown. And twice in the last 24 hours, I have had Firefox freeze for over two minutes (there's a clock gadget on my desktop I glance at when such a problem starts) just from displaying a simple dialogue box to decide where to save a file; the delay seemed to be with showing the list of files in the target folder (incidentally, normally an unnecessary extra step; I wish it wouldn't do that). Is the indexing one of those worse-than-useless "features" that should be terminated with extreme prejudice on sight, or is something else going on here?

Hi, I concur with Rich's comments.. When you hold down the shift key in the manner described you are achieving two things 1 By-passing the Recycle Bin and deleting the files immediately………. Beneficial on disc space but bad news if you make a mistake! 2 The shift key is also used to select a whole "range" of files/folders starting with the originally selected file/folder and finishing with the last one that has focus ( when the Shift key was pressed. Someone else may be able to comment on the Vista issues but the procedural error of routinely by-passing the Recycle Bin could be a tough habit to break…but good luck with trying to! Regards paws