I see it's been a while. Having encountered a similar problem on my C-Drive and carried out some research I thought I'd reply to the one who seems to have suffered most - and hopefully still has the CD ...
If your Briefcase Database has become corrupted, you can remove it at the command prompt and then open your briefcase - all files will be orphaned, but at least you'll be able to read them !
- Close any explorer windows that are viewing the briefcase
- start a command prompt and cd to the briefcase folder
(if you have "show full path in address bar" selected, Explorer may tell you exactly where it is, if not drag it to the command window and that may show you.)
- dir /a:h will show "Briefcase Database" (and desktop.ini)
- attrib -h "briefcase database"
- del "briefcase database"
(del doesn't find hidden files ...)
re-opening the Briefcase in Explorer will recreate an empty Briefcase Database and orphan all files. I would recommend creating a new briefcase, though, as I couldn't vouch for the integrity of this approach.
You may have to use copy (or xcopy) at a command prompt to copy the files from the CD first in order to be able to do this. This may not copy hidden files - and so it will "fix itself" - but if any of your Briefcase content is hidden you wouldn't get those either.
For me - the problem was Right-Clicking on a file in the briefcase immediately presented this message several times before it then presented the Right Click menu.
Things that can corrupt your Briefcase Database will include:
- Opening the Briefcase in another version of Windows*
- Disk error :-( : check your Event Log.
- Trying to be clever with the synchronisation(s) - which is probably what I did at some point.
- possibly an application error whilst editing a file in the Briefcase
* Once Windows 2003 "kindly" upgraded my Briefcase Database on Windows XP after connecting back to the tsclient share and opening it on the server. This was how I found the hidden files first time ;-)
Hope this helps somebody ...
Tim
