Explorer bug

  • Thread starter Thread starter Chris Saunders
  • Start date Start date
C

Chris Saunders

Sometimes when I select a folder in Explorer a green progress bar appears at
the top
of the window where the directory path is listed. Sometimes this bar
doesn't finish
and Explorer crashes. I'm just wondering what activity this progress bar if
for?

Regards
Chris Saunders
 
It appears that the green bar measures the progress of the system reading the
files in the folder. I'm not sure why Explorer is crashing on you, however.
It doesn't do that with me. Maybe you have some corrupted files.
 
The crash occurs after I extract an *.AVI file that was compressed in *.rar
format.
This does not always happen - just on sime *.AVI files. I don't know if the
files are
corrupt but WinRAR doesn't show any error messages while decompressing them.

Do you know for a fact that the green bar represents this? It seems that it
takes longer
when there are large files in the directory, perhaps the system is doing
some kind of search
in the files? Thanks for the reply.

Regards
Chris Saunders
 
Hello,

The green bar represents the progress explorer is making in loading the
display.

Even after loading the list of files, explorer continues to do additional
things, and the green bar won't complete until it is completely finished.
These things include:

- Filling additional columns you may have displayed
- Loading the program icons for individual EXE files
- Looking up the metadata for the items in the folder
- Loading or creating thumnail images
- Performing any search-based function you may have initiated

From what you've described, it sounds like explorer is crashing while trying
to create a thumbnail of the video file. This most likely is a bug in
whatever codec is used to encode that avi, and not explorer itself.

To fix it, try upgrading whatever codec that particular avi is encoded in,
or you can just turn off thumbnails from Organize -> Folder Options -> View
Tab.

Also, I recall reading other posts on this topic that involves changing a
registry entry to fix the problem. You may try searching for AVI and see if
those posts relate to your problem as well.

- JB

Vista FAQ
http://www.jimmah.com/vista/
 
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