W10 (?) adding empty folders (even one named in German) to any USB drive I connect

This has been happening for a year or two, I thought today is a good day to try to tame this mystery.

It’s happened with my TB external drives, and USB sticks… different names throughout the times.

And now once again, I connected a USB stick, and I just got a new folder on the drive.

The name of this folder is "Bücher" (books in German).

And what it contains is a family tree of empty folders.

The "deepest" folder, its full path is:

D:BücherRicardo!!! Only One Copy – Fix !!!Camera Roll

We have to start somewhere, so, breaking it apart, here’s what I have for possible clues:

"Bücher" (books): my girlfriend is German. I live in Germany. I’ve had a Kindle that broke. I’ve another brand e-reader that I haven’t used in ages, I don’t even remember its name. Maybe one or the other or both have a folder named "Bücher"?

"Ricardo": it’s my name and it’s the name of my W10 user folder (c:UsersRicardo)

"!!! Only One Copy – Fix !!!" is indeed a quite panicky name, but yes this was me writing it as the name I gave to a folder on a backup drive (not sure if on the root of the drive), once upon a time, years ago, and I was needing to buy another drive so this panicky naming was so I wouldn’t forget that I had a single point of failure in the contents of that folder (very large files of not-that-critical importance). I have no clue why it shows up in this mystery, as I don’t about the others anyway

"Camera Roll" is the name of the folder containing media from the W10 camera, it usually lives inside the user directory. But I don’t exclude the possibility that I had some sort of backup folder with this very name on one of the external HDD’s.

I’ve searched with the Everything app, the internal SSD for "Bücher" and "!!! Only One Copy – Fix !!!", and none of these exist. And I haven’t connected those old possible sources (the e-readers or the older backup HDDs) perhaps already for more than a year.

I also thought of searching the Windows Registry (regedit.exe) for "Bücher" and… guess what, it does find stuff!

Now though I don’t know what to make of it. I have the faintest clue. So I’m just gonna tell you…

Inside

"ComputerHKEY_USERSS-1-5-21-2733834123-3308434371-3429571556-1001SoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerUser Shell Folders"

A key is indeed inside:

"{AB5FB87B-7CE2-4F83-915D-550846C9537B}"

with the value

"D:BücherRicardo!!! Only One Copy – Fix !!!Camera Roll"

… closer to solving the mystery? Maybe with your help, yeah.

Oh and this is from the second round of search. I also found it inside

"ComputerHKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerUser Shell Folders" but I didn’t think of copying the key before hitting F3 to search more. Tell me if you need it pls (and by the way pls tell me why, then, haha..)

Note: I am a massive tinkerer, I have a stable OS with (just checked) 199 folders just inside "C:Program Files (x86)" so yes I do install a lot of software, namely UI tinkering stuff. It’s the closest I can get to why this nutty file path exists inside "User Shell Folders"

Thanks for all your patience in reading my verbosity, if you got so far, phew 🙂

P.S.: now I suppose if I would delete these registry keys I could quite likely close the case, I get a feeling it would stop the folder from reappearing on USB drives, but I wouldn’t learn what happened… maybe you’ll be as curious as me… so I’m still posting.

Thanks thanks!

"ComputerHKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerUser Shell Folders"

"ComputerHKEY_USERSS-1-5-21-2733834123-3308434371-3429571556-1001SoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerUser Shell Folders"