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Sometimes in Windows 7 file explorer freezes upon right-clicking a file or folder. I understand this is a 3rd party software fault. Is this really so?

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closed as not a real question by Zypher♦, splattne♦ Aug 10 '10 at 7:02

It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. For help clarifying this question so that it can be reopened, see the FAQ.

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This could be any number of issues including third-party software. You need to provide more information on your environment or what you are trying to do when these freezes happen. eg. are you connected to an active directory domain?

The culprits in my experience tend to be:

Network operations are unpredictable and can "block" the system from processing the UI hence the freezing. Are you connected to a domain? Do you have a lot of file shares mapped or open? Sometimes drives can go to sleep and Windows will make a request to them when you access the context menu which triggers a number of actions behind the scenes which block the system.

Shell extensions are things like Tortoise SVN that add additional options to the right-click (context) menu. If these need to do additional processing to show you information (or there is a bug) then there is a chance that the processing will block and prevent the shell extension from displaying immediately.

(This is not a programming site but it helps to understand that Windows applications have a thing called a message pump. If you the messages are not being pumped frequently the result is a freeze, or other unpredictable behaviour. You may not see any CPU usage in Task Manager either!)

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This. I've also seen the issue if there are video files in the folder in question, with either a missing or screwed up codec. Explorer tries to build a thumbnail for the file or gather some info (length, resolution) and locks up for a while until it decides it gives up. – Chris Thorpe May 17 '10 at 4:23
Why I was very general with my question was because I have found the problem mentioned in a number of forums and assumed it was fairly widespread. The comments on the forums deal mainly with shell extentions and they recommend using ShellExView to identify problem programs, or editing the registry(me?)(see for example sevenforums.com/crashes-debugging/…) Why has this problem suddenly appeared with Vista/7? That is why I am asking the question I asked originally. Has Windows 7 perhaps got "stuff" these program writers don't know about? – John May 18 '10 at 19:47
@John I've been running Windows Vista and 7 without these issues, but I run a leaner config than most people. More often than not it is a combination of issues. It is a bit like the way medicines interact for some people and not others. With Vista there were a lot of changes to how things worked. Somethings would be considered backwards compatible but performance dropped. @Chris great point. Thumbnails technically fall under the Shell extension area, but they require an additional codec to do the work. An extension for handling ZIP files might also have dependencies like this etc. – Brian Lyttle May 27 '10 at 2:42

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