IIS and VS 2013 Express hell – how to properly change My Documents folder

So I had an odd situation where one company I was working at turned off ALL OUTGOING ports (yes – all including the web) for all employees. You needed special permission and they would enable this. So all remote access was removed for all of my other clients – so I hitch hiked free wifi from a neighbour, but long ago – I moved my “My Documents” to a network drive. To switch this back … one needs to know a few things. My VS 2013’s IIS Express 8.0 would not read or write to its IIS config location (because it was still pointing to a network location which was unavailable) on the My Documents sub-folder. Well, here are the keys to solving it – DO NOT UNINSTALL IT YET – try some things first.

There are TWO registry entries to change My Documents. Read the command line stuff in this article and sure enough this was the key

• reg add “HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders” /v “Personal” /t REG_SZ /d “C:\Users\%USERNAME%\Documents” /f
• reg add “HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders” /v “Personal” /t REG_EXPAND_SZ /d %%USERPROFILE%%”\Documents” /f

Note that the “Personal” key is the one that represents “My Documents” and on Windows 7 points the DOCUMENTS folder under your user profile. It is this 2nd one that was the clincher.