Malformed movie causes near-hang. How to enforce don't touch policy?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Lauritz
  • Start date Start date
L

Lauritz

The trouble of not being able to delete a movie-file
because it's somehow "in use by another program" is
probably a common one. A more serious one I've recently
come across is that a certain malformed .avi file, or
atleast malformed versus the installed drivers, causes
explorer.exe to claim all available CPU-time, causing a
near-hang of the whole system. clicking on the file
without opening it is enough to cause this hang.
Managing to close the explorer-window will not solve the
problem, the explorer.exe process needs to be manually
ended via the Windows Task Manager.

I've come to believe that both problems stem from explorer
wanting to extract information from the movie-file but not
being able to do so efficiently for most codecs. Is there
a way to stop WinXP from extracting meta-information from
movie-files?
 
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\SystemFileAssociations\.avi\shellex\PropertyHandler
But I believe it's caused by the preview.
 
Thankyou! :-D After exporting the key in question for backup, I deleted it and now I can safely open the malformed file and toss around with it in explorer with no performance-trouble

I don't use thumbnail-views, so if that's what you mean by preview I don't think it collected it, but for say an MP3 file, explorer will show the bitrate and stuff in the status bar and I suppose explorer was trying to (unsuccessfully) retrieve similar information from the avi-file.
 
Back
Top