weird WinXP problem - too many desktop background options

[Megatomic]

I did some googling and found no answer to my question. So, I pose it to you all -

All the sudden the entire contents of my My Pictures folder are available as options for my desktop background. It used to be that only pics I put in the c:\windows folder were there, now there are thousands of items. How do I fix this barring deleting the contents of my My Pictures folder?

 

[tcsenter]

Holy crap, mine is the same way. I haven't changed my desktop background in a few months and it wasn't like that before.

 

[tcsenter]

Well...I found a couple discussions on different forums and newsgroups but the consensus was that Microsoft decided that we need this and the only 'easy' way to undo it is to move all your picture files to a different folder and leave My Pictures empty.

It appears this 'feature' is triggered whenever you use the "My Pictures Slideshow" screen saver, set a picture in the My Pictures folder as your background, or browse to the folder to select a background image. I tried deleting all of the Wallpaper MRU entries in the registry but it didn't help.

Vista allows customization of the folders that the background changer will use to build the list of background images, but it appears XP does not.