Disappearing folder in Windows XP64 bit

It's been weird Microsoft problems week. We're in the process of migrating data from a 2003 file server to 2008. Then we discovered some problems, but only users with XP 64bit. Folders were vanishing! And no one was deleting them. They'd try to re-copy them, only to discover that the folders were still there. And this was not happening to their colleagues using Windows XP or Windows 7.

After some testing it's worth mentioning we had some corruption on the previous file server. A power outage prompted checkdisk to run and we let it. But when checkdisk completed we found a lot of files and folders were missing permission and file ownership data. We replaced these manually but the deeper the folder structure, the less likely inheritance had been applied all through the subdirectories.

Our theory is 2008 and XP 64 read the file and folder data differently than 2003 and XP 32 and these rather large directories exhibiting the symptoms all have some missing or corrupt low level file records.

But, here's the fix:

1. Copy the files and folders to another location.

2. Create the directory structure with different folder names. This prevents explorer from caching views for known directory structures. (You can see this in play when you rename the folders after step 4. Explorer will revert to whatever folder view the user had set when they could see the files and folders after the rename.)
3. Copy the contents of the directory to the new folders. For example:

Users want \\fileserver\Users\FolderA\FolderB. Folder B keeps disappearing in Explorer. FolderA has file1, file2, file3. Create a new folder called FolderC and copy file1, file2, file3. Create a folder under FolderA called FolderD. Copy the contents of FolderB to FolderD.

4. Delete FolderA. Rename Folder C and Folder D to A and B. You're done.

Doing this fixed the issue on all of our 64bit clients. And if anyone has an explanation, I'd be more than happy to hear it!