A bit off topic here, but this bugs the hell out of me and I’ve searched all over for an answer with no results. The situation is then when deleting files, particularly shortcuts (.lnk files) on Windows XP, it sometimes takes forever. I just deleted a shortcut and it totally froze explorer for well over a minute. It showed the dialog with the file flying out of the folder into the recycle bin, over and over and over. Sometimes I can click the cancel or close button on the dialog and it closes and the file is deleted. Other times it’s just frozen in that state. At this point, task manager says explorer is not responding. But if I wait long enough, it generally does complete.
This happens fairly often on one computer, and occasionally on another, and I’ve talked to others who have had the same problem. But I’ve spent quite a bit of time searching for a solution, or even just for an acknowledgment that the problem exists. Never came up with anything.
If anyone has an idea of what causes this, or better yet, how to fix it, please let me know. I’m getting nervous about deleting stuff!
Have you emptied your trash recently? if you have a large number of files in trash, deleting anything can take a long time.
ah, yes. that’s annoying. 🙂 and rw errors on cdrom or loss of network share, that kills explorer too. heavy! I’ve been using total commander for file management for 8 years now. it handles some of those issues pretty well.
Beth, I think you might be onto something. I had close to 4 GB in the trash! It’s still emptying. Says 39 minutes remaining. It would make sense that that might be the problem. I’ll report back when it’s empty.
Wow, that was it! I can delete now! Yay!
… yeah, I get excited easy. 🙂
I always use shift+delete and it never has taken long at all…
4GB of trash! That’s a lot of SWFs. 😉
Ha. Actually, I think what is was was old source control repositories. We go through lots of branches here and at any given time I have 3-4 or more of them synched. When I no longer need a particular branch, I delete it. Each branch has many, MANY thousands of files. I guess I’ll be shift-deleting those babies now. 🙂
I had that problem a year or so ago too. No matter what I did I couldn’t resolve it. In the end it came down to that one undeniable truth: Ya gotta reload Windows every six or eight months no matter how you try to avoid it. Backup, format, install.
Cheers,
Brent
Thanks for this blog! I was wondering why things were going slow. On one computer I only had 350 entries but they were pretty BIG (forgot to get the size). On my other computer that was even SLOWER, there was 43,000 entries! There was a runaway process that made 1 or 2 extra log files, haha.
azbok
One thing I found is if you use cameras and scanners but not all the time, it will slow down explorer. If you set it for “manual” on startup it will only start when you plug your camera or scanner in.
Go to:
Control Panel
Administrative Tools
Services
then look for:
Windows Image Acquisition (WIA)
Set for “manual”
One other thing I did was look through the list and set other things I don’t use all the time to manual. Like printer status monitor, ipod service, google updater, adobe LM service, lightscribe disc labeling, etc… When you plug then in or turn them on they will start the service.
JUST BE CAREFUL STOPPING THINGS….
YOU MIGHT END UP SCREWING SOMETHING UP!
If you aren’t sure if you should stop something, do some research first.
Bob
Owner
FunToSearch.com