Duplicate Desktop Folder

I'm moving from XP to Vista and I'm a bit confused about the folder
structure displayed by Windows Explorer in Vista.

In one user profile I see in the left-hand pane of Explorer:

Desktop
Username
Contacts
Desktop
files & folders
Desktop
files & folders

The files and folders are the same and are plainly pointers to the same
location on the disk, because if I delete something in one place, it's
deleted from the other. If I look at the "Properties" of an item, it's
location shows as C:\Users\username\Contacts\Desktop

In another user profile, I see something that's more reasonable:

Desktop
Username
Contacts
Desktop
files & folders

In this second profile, the location of items on the desktop is
C:\Users\username\Desktop

If I try to delete the "Desktop" that's in the Contacts folder, I get an
error message when I click on the top-level "Desktop" folder.

How do I get rid of this extraneous Desktop folder?

Curious George wrote:
> I'm moving from XP to Vista and I'm a bit confused about the folder
> structure displayed by Windows Explorer in Vista.
>
> In one user profile I see in the left-hand pane of Explorer:
>
> Desktop
> Username
> Contacts
> Desktop
> files & folders
> Desktop
> files & folders
>
> The files and folders are the same and are plainly pointers to the same
> location on the disk, because if I delete something in one place, it's
> deleted from the other. If I look at the "Properties" of an item, it's
> location shows as C:\Users\username\Contacts\Desktop
>
> In another user profile, I see something that's more reasonable:
>
> Desktop
> Username
> Contacts
> Desktop
> files & folders
>
> In this second profile, the location of items on the desktop is
> C:\Users\username\Desktop
>
> If I try to delete the "Desktop" that's in the Contacts folder, I get an
> error message when I click on the top-level "Desktop" folder.
>
> How do I get rid of this extraneous Desktop folder?
>
>
>

A bit more information:

If I open a Command Prompt and run a DIR command in the "problem"
profile, there is no subdirectory named Desktop in c:\users\username\
There is C:\users\username\contacts\desktop.

If I run DIR in a "good" profile, there *is* a subdirectory named Desktop.

Simply moving C:\users\username\Contacts\Desktop to C:\users\username\
doesn't seem to work. I suspect the problem has to do with the
desktop.ini file, but I'm stuck at how to proceed.

Curious George wrote:
> I'm moving from XP to Vista and I'm a bit confused about the folder
> structure displayed by Windows Explorer in Vista.
>
> In one user profile I see in the left-hand pane of Explorer:
>
> Desktop
> Username
> Contacts
> Desktop
> files & folders
> Desktop
> files & folders
>
> The files and folders are the same and are plainly pointers to the same
> location on the disk, because if I delete something in one place, it's
> deleted from the other. If I look at the "Properties" of an item, it's
> location shows as C:\Users\username\Contacts\Desktop
>
> In another user profile, I see something that's more reasonable:
>
> Desktop
> Username
> Contacts
> Desktop
> files & folders
>
> In this second profile, the location of items on the desktop is
> C:\Users\username\Desktop
>
> If I try to delete the "Desktop" that's in the Contacts folder, I get an
> error message when I click on the top-level "Desktop" folder.
>
> How do I get rid of this extraneous Desktop folder?
>
>
>

I don't know how this happened, but I found the location of the shell
folders in the registry from
http://www.winhelponline.com/article...ows-Vista.html

I first made the directory c:\users\username\desktop
Then changed the registry entry to point at that folder (instead of
....\Contacts\Desktop)
Then moved all of the contents of ...username\Contacts\Desktop to
....\username\Desktop (including the hidden desktop.ini file)

And things *seem* back to normal.