A little tip I stumbled across recently that came in handy:
I noticed that my PC was running extremely slowly, so I brought up the task manager to check things out. Explorer.exe was pegged at 99% utilization. Since explorer.exe is used pretty much anytime a file is accessed, that didn’t exactly give me a whole lot of information about what could be going on.
After quite a bit of searching and reading discussion threads, the July 5, 2003 comment from Nilknarf on this forum posting led me to a solution. Apparently, the cause was a corrupt AVI file and opening the containing directory in Windows Explorer caused it to go berserk trying to get meta information from the file. So, I had to disable properties on AVI files in order to keep this from happening. The process:
- Open up regedit
- Goto HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\SystemFileAssociations\.avi\shellex\PropertyHandler
- Delete the “Default” value which should be “{87D62D94-71B3-4b9a-9489-5FE6850DC73E}”
Gotta love Windows. Particularly since this has been an issue since at least 2003 and it still hasn’t been fixed.
Posted in Technology
Merle January 17, 2007, 9:12 pm
Do you have Explorer set with the “display details if I mouse hover over the item”? Or is it just looking at the meta information for an icon? If it’s the display details thing, I’d turn that off immediately. It slows down Explorer by quite a lot.
riley February 20, 2007, 5:53 pm
This issue has been driving me crazy as well. Found a few so-called fix’s but as yet no solution. I dont have a “HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\SystemFileAssociations” folder in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT – on any of my machines?????
best
riley February 20, 2007, 6:43 pm
Here is how to actually fix this problem;
1) Open a command window (Start->Run, type in ‘cmd’ hit enter)
2) To remove image preview, type and hit enter regsvr32 /u shimgvw.dll
3) To readd image preview, type and hit enter regsvr32 shimgvw.dll
4) To remove media preview, type and hit enter regsvr32 /u shmedia.dll
5) To readd media preview, type and hit enter regsvr32 shmedia.dll
Life is good again….
dj January 11, 2008, 3:38 am
Anyone else who has been having this problem or similar i would seriously advise reading the thread to the link below.
There are Some very nice fixes there to a problem that seems to have morphed from AVI files and codec clashes and Reg fixes are not really necaessary.
goodluck
http://www.hm2k.com/posts/my-avi-files-crash-explorerexe