SharePoint Explorer View Problem for IE 6

If you are in an environment where all of the end users still are in Windows File Share Mode, your SharePoint environment will have many many layers of Folders and the users will depend on the drag and drop functionality of the SharePoint Explorer View.

When a user tries to open Explorer View on a subfolder they will get a "Page not found" message.

There is a known bug with this functionality within Internet Explorer 6, as referenced by this Microsoft KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/923906, and basically there is a 100 Character limit within IE6 forthe Explorer view.


There is a quick workaround for this:
Have the users go to the top level folder on the SharePoint site to open it with Explorer view.
Then have them navigate to the folder they want to go within Explorer View. Navigating through the levels of folders within Explorer View has no limit on the folder path length.

If you want to implelment a more permanent solution here is a registry fix provided by a link within Microsoft KB article above. (note: as with any registry modifications, be very careful as this will cause the Earth to stop spinning on its axis, or something like that)

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2. To set the limit to 260 characters, locate the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\FeatureControl\KB325355_INCREASE_WEBFOLDER_MAXURLLENGTH_TO_260CHAR subkey.
3. On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
4. Type iexplore.exe for the Value Name.
5. Double-click iexplore.exe.
6. Click Hexadecimal, in the Value Data area, type 0x1, and then click OK.
Note: To revert to the 100-character limit for backward compatibility, reset this value to 0x0.