You cannot view Web content files in Thumbnails view after you install Windows XP Service Pack 1 or Windows XP Service Pack 2

After you install Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 1 (SP1) or Windows XP Service Pack (SP2), you may not be able to view some Web content files in Thumbnails view in My Computer or in Windows Explorer.

This behavior occurs for stability and performance reasons. For stability and performance reasons, Windows XP SP1 and Windows XP SP2 make Thumbnails view unavailable for the following file types:

• HTML documents (.htm and .html files)
• XML documents (.xml files)
• Internet e-mail messages (.eml files)
• Internet news messages (.nws files)

This behavior is by design.

If you can still view some Web content files in Thumbnails view after you installed Windows XP Service Pack 1 (SP1) or Windows XP Service Pack (SP2), the Shimgvw.dll file may not have been registered correctly during the installation of Windows XP SP1 or Windows XP SP2.

To resolve this issue, follow these steps to register the Shimgvw.dll file :

1. Log on to the computer as an administrator.
2. Click Start, click Run, type regsvr32 %systemroot%\system32\shimgvw.dll, and then click OK. You receive a message that states that DllRegisterServer in Shimgvw.dll succeeded.
3. Click OK.

After you follow these steps, you cannot view the actual content of the Web file in Thumbnails view. You can only see the Internet Explorer icon. For more information about folder views in Windows XP, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: For more information about Windows XP Service Pack 1, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: