What is the green bar in folders?

[stanmuffin]

Running Windows Vista Ultimate x64 on an Athlon X2 3800+ machine with
2GB RAM.

When I hit F5 to refresh a folder--even a folder with one 0-byte file
in it and nothing else, in a non-indexed location, the folder's
contents disappear and a green bar starts crawling s..l..o..w..l..y
across the breadcrumb bar. It stops before it gets to the right side,
and the only way I can see the contents of the folder is to close the
window and open a new one. Any ideas what's going on?

 

[theclyde]

Running Windows Vista Ultimate x64 on an Athlon X2 3800+ machine with
2GB RAM.

When I hit F5 to refresh a folder--even a folder with one 0-byte file
in it and nothing else, in a non-indexed location, the folder's
contents disappear and a green bar starts crawling s..l..o..w..l..y
across the breadcrumb bar. It stops before it gets to the right side,
and the only way I can see the contents of the folder is to close the
window and open a new one. Any ideas what's going on?

You are using Vista. That is what is going on.

When Vista displays files, it needs to interrogate them (at least
twice from what I can see). Once to get the file information (file
name, date created/modified) then at least one (maybe more) time to
get the extended information (dimensions, exif tags, mp3 tags, etc..).
This can be really killer slow, especially if you have many files or
large files.

If I switch to details view and remove all columns but the filename,
size and date I get the green bar flipping through nice and fast. As
soon as I add a column the problems start. And you would think once it
went through and grabbed the information it would reuse it. But I have
found even changing the sort order will cause a complete green bar
situation again.

Fortunately, it has not crashed on me as it has for you, although at
times my system has stopped responding for 5 seconds to a minute while
Vista tries to read the extended information again.

Why can't it read the base information, display the files then fill in
the extended information without stopping the computer? Joys of
Vista.

 

[stanmuffin]

When Vista displays files, it needs to interrogate them (at least

twice from what I can see). Once to get the file information (file
name, date created/modified) then at least one (maybe more) time to
get the extended information (dimensions, exif tags, mp3 tags, etc..).
This can be really killer slow, especially if you have many files or
large files.

Did you read my first message? This happens when I have 1 file
totaling 0 bytes in size.

Windows XP displays file metadata and does not have this crazy delay.
Does anyone know what is actually going on?

 

[theclyde]

Did you read my first message? This happens when I have 1 file
totaling 0 bytes in size.

Windows XP displays file metadata and does not have this crazy delay.
Does anyone know what is actually going on?

Explorer is stalling out trying to parse a 0 byte file? It cannot find
any meta-data nor a file type so it knows how to look for the data, so
it never completes. Swag in any case.