If you ever happen to venture into the system folders on your Windows installation, you may come across these mysterious entities called dot-dll files which take up a lot of space, but don’t seem to do anything important. They aren’t movie or music files, they don’t work in a word processor, you can’t color them in the paint program. They are just DLLs.

These are the shared libraries of the operating system, and most of the time you don’t really want to touch them, for they are also mighty delicate critters, and tend to break easily. One broken DLL can give you days of hell while you try to figure out what is wrong with your machine.

I said most of the time. Because there are times you may need to mess with them and get your hands dirty, just on the possibility that you might be able to recover from an error on your own that could otherwise mean calling support and responding to the endless automated options on the telephone. And when you finally reach live support, you find you had somewhere pressed the wrong button, and have to do it all over again.

So here’s something that may help you to avoid all that.

Suppose you have lost the ability to preview certain types of images in the tab called ‘Desktop’, inside the Display Properties window (the one you get when you right-click on the desktop and choose ‘Properties’). Normally, bitmap pictures (dot-bmp) will continue to show up as previews, but sometimes jpegs and gifs will stop previewing. So before calling support, you need to re-register one of your DLLs. DLLs are delicate little thingies, as I have said before, and if you look at them cross-eyed, they can get unregistered. Re-registering them often solves many problems without having to resort to a painful support call.

Sounds complicated? Don’t worry, just follow these steps and you’ll be all right. This is what you can do to restore normal behavior.

Click the Start button, click ‘Run’. Now type in the following:

regsvr32 /i shell32.dll
and then press ENTER.

That’s telling the registration method to re-register the DLL called shell32, which contains most of the graphic functions of the Windows desktop, and controls the way you navigate and work. In nine cases out of ten, this will restore the lost preview function. Easy, wasn’t it?

Try another one. Sometimes you’ll find that the Quick Launch bar (usually locate just to the right of the Start button) is missing, and you’ll want to have it back. How to go about it?

It’s a two-step process, but you already know the first step. That’s right – click on Run, type in

regsvr32 /i shell32.dll

and hit ENTER.

Then, click on Run again, and this time type in

regsvr32 /i browseui.dll

and you’re done. You have the Quick Launch again.

Can you believe it? You’re re-registering DLL-s now, hacking Windows internals (well, almost) to make it work for you! That’s called a power user! Just remember to stick to these commands only, and not venture out on your own, and you’ll be all right. And if they don’t work, they surely won’t do any harm.

Just one thing more – after each of these re-registrations, remember that you may not see the change right away, but may have to restart Windows before you do. Good bye and happy hacking!