I recently deleted the folder “Favoriten” in the home directory of my Windows 7. This broke the explorer feature as the folder was not recreated. To do this simply open a command prompt (cmd) cd to your home directory and use the following statements to recreate the folder and restore the explorer functionality:
mkdir Favorites mklink /j Favoriten Favorites
This is of course for a german version of windows. After executing these statements my favorites are working again.