Windows 7: Windows Photo Viewer does not work

Question

After I changed the ProgramFilesDir to D:\Program Files manually, the Windows Photo Viewer did not work again.

It failed to start with error messagebox Rundll: could not found D:\Program Files\Windows Photo Viewer\PhotoViewer.dll.

How could I get my photo viewer work without reverting the ProgramFilesDir?

Thanks in advance.

If you browse to the directory and run the exe from there does it work? — ChrisF, Sep 25 '10 at 13:46
Some windows elements need to reside on the system volume - this may be one of them — BJ292, Mar 31 '12 at 19:27

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited Nov 20 '22 at 13:19

You might have moved your Program Files folder to D:, but left Windows folder on drive C:. If so, it's not going to work. Ever.

From Raymond Chen:

Now that NTFS is mandatory for the system volume (it took only 13 years to get there!), Windows itself can start taking advantage of NTFS features.

A large percentage of the files installed by Windows are hard-linked to copies in the C:\Windows\WinSxS directory. ...and in Windows 7, the two copies of Notepad are now hard links to each other.

Ah, but one of the limitations of hard links is that they cannot span volumes. Some of the hard links out of the WinSxS directory point into places like C:\Program Files\Windows NT\Accessories\wordpad.exe, and this in turn requires that the Program Files directory be on the same volume as your Windows directory.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

PhotoViewer can probably no longer find its required files, because you moved them.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

If you did move Windows folder to drive D:, then this answer doesn't apply to you.

Windows 7: Windows Photo Viewer does not work

1 Answers1