Windows XP - enable left details panel / pane in explorer

[Sethioz]

This is tutorial on how to enable the left panel / pane that shows the details, such as "hide the content of this drive", shows the thumbnail of an image you select, shows "other places", HDD space when you select drive and other stuff like that. Sometimes it disappears and windows doesn't exactly have an option to enable it.

1. open registry editor
- start
- run
- type in "regedit" and press enter

2. browse to the following location

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[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\WebView

- most likely value is 0 (00000000)
- change it to 1, double click on the key and then pop-up box appears, change 0 to 1 and click ok

3. open up task manager (process explorer recommended)
- kill explorer.exe
- choose run (from task manager or process explorer)
- type in explorer or explorer.exe and press enter

now left panel should be there, if not, change the following registry too:
browse to the following location and this time change the value to 0

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[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\ClassicShell

kill explorer again and run it again.

you can also just restart your pc if you like, however doing it via process explorer is easier and faster.