I bopped the last two gophers in my Windows Media Center 2005 upgrade (see part 1, part 2, and part 3) last night - DVDs wouldn't play within Media Center interface, and the correct association of icons on my auxiliary "drives" (SD, CompactFlash, Memork Stick, and SmartMedia) after adding a secondary hard drive.

The DVD playing problem, as expected, succumbed to the installation of a new DVD decoder, one that advertised support for MCE2005 (the one that comes with the Gateway was apparently released in 2002).  I chose NVidia's PureVideo decoder since there were prior reports of it working and it was half the price of an upgrade to the WinDVD decoder.  The free download is working now and I have 30 days to drop the $19.95 for the basic version.  (Or decide like a technological lemming that surround sound is in my near future and get a pricer version which supports it.)

The icon challenge was a little trickier.  While you can change icons on folders and shortcuts through the "Properties" dialog, there is no such interface for the name and icon of a drive.  A search of Help and Support was not actually helpful or supportive.  After searching in vain for icons that might be squirrelled away in hidden system files on the C: drive, I decided the association of drive letter to name and icon must be stored in the registry.  Start/Run.../"regedit" gets you the graphical interface to the registry, but the registry contains thousands of entries, and searching for the text "icon" resulted in hundreds of matches of which I eventually wearied of wading through.

An MSN Search on the full english phrase "How do I change the icon on the disk drive in Windows XP?" led me to a useful site with tips and tweaks for XP.  Tips 119 and 237 offered scripts for changing the icons on the primary and secondary drives.  While I would be extremely wary of running scripts off a random internet site, I did download and look at (not run) the scripts, and found that the last one modified a registry entry of:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\DriveIcons\

With this path I was able to find the pretty self-explanatory registry keys which associated the drive letter with a name and icon.  By shifting the drive letter up one, (D: -> E:), the icons and names were restored to their rightful places.  Except H: still seemed to be taken up by the DVD drive, which overrid the Memory Stick Icon.  After some fruitless search on registry entries to reset the drive letter, I simply moved the Memory Stick icon to I:.

It's pretty amazing though that this particular rabbit hole (OK, I hear you! I'm quitting the small animal theme already!) still exists - dynamic allocation of drive letters combined with static descriptions of those drives in the registry.  A mismatch as awkward and poisonous as a platypus (OK, so I lied about the small animal - call me a rat).  Not only was adding a second hard drive completely painless, but I can't meaningfully assign a Camera icon to drive J:, because sometimes J: is associated with a USB key or a Rio Muvo.  I remember the old Mac days (probably hasn't changed much) where you simply pasted your new icon into the Properties window and you were set.  And you didn't have to name your primary disk drive "C:".  Ironic to call that the "old days"!

Anyway, I think I'm done with the upgrade.  I'm sure you're tired of reading about it!  Before trying this at home, stock up on patience and persistence, take good notes, and share your success back with the community so others can follow your footsteps.