Thumbnail views disappearing

I bet that you recently uninstalled Microsoft Photo Editor from Microsoft Office (XP, Win2K, or Windows 97) or perhaps uninstalled and reinstalled Office without including Photo Editor in the reinstallation process. In either case, you've lost your association between JPEG and .gif files and the now-missing Photo Editor application. To address the problem, you need to manually associate JPEG and .gif files with Microsoft Paint by editing the registry. Because this problem can occur with other graphic file types such as .bmp, I will make my explanation general.

To edit the registry data, you must navigate to the following registry location associated with each file type

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\file_extShellEx\{BB2E617C-0920-11d1-9A0B-00C04FC2D6C1}
where file_ext is the extension for the graphic file type in question (e.g., .bmp, .gif, .jpg, .jpeg).

In many cases, you might find that the ShellEx and/or {BB2E6...} subkeys don't exist. If so, you need to create them. Next, you must make sure that the value of the {BB2E6...} subkey is set to exactly the following data: {7376D660-C583-11d0-A3A5-00C04FD706EC}.

After you complete these steps for each graphic file type, you should be able to again correctly view graphic thumbnail previews. When you verify these settings or make changes, remember that JPEG files have three possible extensions by default: .jpe, .jpg, and .jpeg.

Ok... when you click on the picture, the "web view" shows you a thumbnail on the side - as compared to thumbnailing all your files. Go Up one level on the folder in question. Right click, choose properties and UNCHECK thumbnails. Open the folder. Go back up again, open properties, and check thumbnails. Then, open the folder again. Choose view, thumbnails and the folder will go back to thumbnail view.

As to what happened - sometimes the thumbs.db file gets corrupted or deleted - this process recreates it.

Luck.
Dr. Sys