[JEaton]

I ended up going into several hundred  music files & manually renaming the "Folder" file to "Folder.jpg"(which is what "MPad" needs to see to display the "Cover Art". I made the mistake of believing that Win7 had "dropped" the ext when in fact it just did'nt display it. While I could'nt see the additional ".jpg" I changed all these files to "Folder.jpg.jpg".

Long story,short, while it was kind of a PITA to straighten out this mess it made me aware to be on the lookout for unusual behavior after Windows Updates (or Vice/Versa)

Whoops.

That confusion was caused simply by the default setting for displaying file extensions in Windows 7. I doubt very much that any update to Windows itself would cause folders or files to be duplicated.

[stereocilia]

Not only duplicated, but duplicated and modified. Some piece of software must really hate those special characters, even though I've never had a problem displaying or playing tunes from the PC.