My memory of XP is sort of poor, but in Vista, in Windows Explorer, Folders View, if you click in the right hand panel and Ct-A =(Select All) it will give you the number of files selected on the bottom Information Bar (if you have that "toolbar" turned on). That will be the (visible) number of files in the folder.

Point is that there are several selections you can make to determine what will be shown. Windows explorer, where you view what files you have, should have a "View" button where you can select several different "information tool bars" to either show or hide.

You may also find some helpful setup changes you can make in Control Panel, where I think XP offers a "Folder Options" section that's an easy place to accidentally turn off the display of things you really should know are there.

Someone who still has XP running may have more useful advice for you, but while waiting you can click a few buttons and look at what ways are available for making it all prettier.

Since it's always fun to give tooooo muuch information:

The last gasp brute force method - - is to open a command prompt (DOS Window) and type "CD \" (don't type the "") and hit Enter to go to the top of the tree on your system drive. Then type "DIR *.* /s" and hit Enter, and the bottom line when it gets done scrolling will be the number of files, number of folders, and total size of all the files, and free space on the drive - for whatever folder you started in, which in this case will be the entire drive. It will also have flipped every folder and all the files in each folder on the screen, but unless your graphics card is extremely weak it will all go past too fast to see much.

My machine takes about 20 minutes to scroll through all the files on my C:\ drive, but your hard drive is a lot faster than the display, so if you type "DIR *.* /s > allmyfiles.txt" my machine takes less than 20 seconds for the DIR (Directory) command to create the file allmyfiles.txt and send everything it would have scrolled through to the file. ( The ">" means "send to" so the results go to the file instead of to the display.)

If you open the .txt file in your text editor or word processor, you can scroll through the document (or in your wp program use Ctl-F to find a folder). The list for each folder will show all the files in the folder with the size of each file, the total number of files in the folder, and the total size of all the files in the folder. Every folder will be "itemized" somewhere in the .txt file.

John