Annoying undeletable empty folder in Start > All Programs

Empty Games folder preventing real Games folder from showing contents

from Stardock Forums

I've been reinstalling loads of my games on a clean Windows 8 Pro 64-bit installation. Due to the game folders in All Programs created by these installs being all over the place, I place them all in the Games folder, also in All Programs (and I do not mean Games Explorer, just to be clear!). I did this by renaming the folder from, say, EA\Crysis 3 to Games\Crysis. I'm asked if I want to combine the folder with the existing Games folder, to which I answer yes. Normally, this has always worked and all my games folders are then listed in one Games folder.

Due to a bug with (I presume since it is a clean Windows install) Start8, I am now left with an empty Games folder that can be opened to show Empty but which cannot be deleted or renamed. This folder overrides the true Games folder in %ProgramData%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs (I checked this and it is there with all the various game sub-folders I'd moved there). If I rename the folder in that location to Games Main then it will show in All Programs, also as Games Main. The problem is that the empty Games folder is still there too.

How do I delete this folder and why does it even show in the first place?

Start8 is mostly an outstanding app but it does have some aggravating bugs such as this and the fact that even with only a mere dozen games installed, all Steam ones, it still took 15-45 seconds to populate the Games Explorer menu link. This was instant on Windows 7 even though I had over 100 games in that list. Why can't Start8 replicate the same method of displaying this list as Windows 7?

start8
5,228 views 4 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top

I found the a Games folder in Users\All Users in the same AppData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs location. It turned out the issue was caused by conflicting shortcuts in both that location and the one for my user account, Darren. Once I'd deleted the duplicates then only one Games folder showed in Start > All Programs and it was populated with all the games I'd been installing.

I've no idea why this issue occurred on a clean install but I presume the All Users folder is intended for sharing settings and shortcuts across all profiles rather than just my own.

I just need to sort out the frustratingly slow Game Explorer menu issue and then I'll finally have nothing to take issue with Start8 about. I'm wondering if this issue can be fixed by having Start8 scan and build a database of locations used by Game Explorer the first time it accesses it then use that to quickly speed up the display of the shortcuts thereafter. All it needs to then do is monitor for any changes and update the database. Windows 7 displayed the list incredibly quickly on my old i7-920 and I had 100+ games being displayed in that Games Explorer menu. Start8 currently takes about 20X as long to display a tenth of those so something clearly isn't right, particularly as I have a faster i7-4770K CPU and faster SATAIII speeds for my Crucial m4 SSD and two SATAIII Seagate Barracuda hard drives where my games are installed (D and E drives).

Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top

The delay in building certain menus is a bug in the rebranded version of MS Security Essentials that Windows 8 comes with.  When the target path of a shortcut is first queried it seems to cause the OS to scan the target file itself for viruses.  As some games have quite large exes this can be slow.  This only happens once per reboot of the machine as it looks like the information is cached.

This is not a bug in the Windows 7 version of MSE which is why it works perfectly on that OS.

We have workarounds in place inside Start8 to avoid this with populating the all programs tree etc, but the popup menus are generated by MS apis which do the lookups themselves and so trigger this problem.

Ashes of the Singularity II
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top

So could I add specific locations to Windows Defender to speed up the population of the Games Explorer menu shortcuts then other than turning it off? If so then which ones would I have to add please? If I add %ProgramData%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs and C:\Users\All Users\ to its exclusion list, would that work?

Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top

Quoting DRHodgson, reply 3

So could I add specific locations to Windows Defender to speed up the population of the Games Explorer menu shortcuts then other than turning it off? If so then which ones would I have to add please? If I add %ProgramData%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs and C:\Users\All Users\ to its exclusion list, would that work?
End of DRHodgson's quote

I imagine the place to exclude would be the target location of the shortcuts which I guess is mostly your steam folder?

The caching means you have to reboot in order to see if it made any difference and then wait while the OS continues to trash the HD as part of the OS finishing loading before trying to see if it helped.