Aliasalpha: There seems to have been a typo in the registry entry for the games explorer.
Open regedit (start, open run, type "Regedit" & enter)
Open the following path:
HKey Local Machine \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ GameUX
In the list that will open, you'll see a series of seemingly meaningless characters encloded by { curly braces }. In my case, I found one that had 2 }'s on the end and that was the problem. Right click, select Rename and delete the last }. If your problem is the same as mine, that should fix it
Right, that did the trick. Just one small correction. The registry path is:
HKey Local Machine \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \
CurrentVersion \ GameUX
That fixes the Games folder, but not the Teenagent part of it. While the folder now loads, the Teenagent icon only shows the standard application icon, not the Teenagent one. And it doesn't work when you doubleclick on it, and there are no options when you right click on it. So something is obviously still screwy. Also, the Games window keeps updating every few seconds.
[EDIT] Okay, a little detective work online got me the second part of the solution. Go to the following folder in your file system:
C:\ Users \ [user name] \ AppData \ Local \ Microsoft \ Windows \ GameExplorer
In there, you will find a number of folders with GUID names enclosed in curly brackets, same as in the registry. If you did the registry fix first, and then tried opening the Games folder, there should now be two folders with the same name, one of them ending in two curly brackets, the other ending only in one. I think the GUIDs are generated at install time, so yours are probably called something else, but the names of the two folders on my system were:
{28F45A9A-9499-461D-962C-F0ED638FCAF4}
{28F45A9A-9499-461D-962C-F0ED638FCAF4}}
If you look into both folders, you'll notice that only the one ending in two curly braces contains anything significant. The other one was auto-generated by Windows when you opened the Games window after doing the registry fix.
Now delete the folder ending in only one curly bracket. There are lots of those, so make damn sure it's the right one, namely the one with the same name as the one ending in two brackets. Then you rename the one with the two brackets, deleting one of the brackets.
And that's it. If you open the Games folder now, Teenagent should be as it should have been in the first place, box art and everything.
It's amazing how much havoc one extra character in an installer can wreak, isn't it?