What's up with the C:\Windows\Assembly folder?

Question

If you go to the C:\Windows\Assembly folder on windows 10 (and possibly earlier versions as well) file explorer looks all weird. What's going on?

As you can see in the image, the menu at the top is different, the path is gone, and the name column says "assembly name".

In addition, the context menu is different, and the files cannot be opened.

Viewing the folder in powershell gives a completely different list of contents (pictured below)

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 02 '22 at 07:47

You're seeing specialized view of the folder contents -- similar to the Fonts and Recent Items folders, which also have specialized views.

The folders all have a desktop.ini file (most commonly associated with specifying custom icons and language-specific display names) with a value named CLSID in the [.ShellClassInfo]:

Assembly:

[.ShellClassInfo]
CLSID={1D2680C9-0E2A-469d-B787-065558BC7D43}

Fonts:

[.ShellClassInfo]
CLSID={BD84B380-8CA2-1069-AB1D-08000948F534}

Recent Items:

[.ShellClassInfo]
LocalizedResourceName=@%SystemRoot%\system32\shell32.dll,-21797
InfoTip=@shell32,dll,-12692
IconResource=%SystemRoot%\system32\imageres.dll,-117
CLSID={0C39A5CF-1A7A-40C8-BA74-8900E6DF5FCD}

The folders must have their ReadOnly attribute set for the desktop.ini file to be displayed, so if you want to see the actual files in Explorer, clear the folder's ReadOnly attribute in PowerShell using:

$dir = Get-Item c:\Windows\Assembly
$dir.Attributes = $dir.Attributes -band -bnot [System.IO.FileAttributes]::ReadOnly

and re-set it using:

$dir = Get-Item c:\Windows\Assembly
$dir.Attributes = $dir.Attributes -bor [System.IO.FileAttributes]::ReadOnly

What's up with the C:\Windows\Assembly folder?

1 Answers1