Windows Explorer crashes when viewing certain folders 10

[BooYaKaSha]

I have this bizarre problem that keeps popping up and is really starting to annoy me:

I have all my documents and my backup files on a D: drive. When I open and view certain folders in Explorer, suddenly that Explorer window quits and I can't access any of the files in there. Usually, but not always, this occurs in a folder in which I have Images.

In the case of my backup files, I can open and view the folder, but when I try to run the installation program, it fails.

And yet still when I try to do any of the above, I get a "Windows Explorer has encountered an error and needs to close..." error, then all of my explorer processes close, including my start menu, and I have to manually restart explorer.

When I copy the parent folder to the desktop and run/open it from there is works fine. I've run Scandisk many times and it never found any problems.

Is there some sort of a limit on the amount of characters in a path & filename that would be causing this error?

Thanks

 

[LewfromTampa]

pete2eat & others:
Yes. Getting rid of the file association between .tif and PS7 DEFINITELY fixes the Windows Explorer crash problem with image files and folders. I had been saving a particular folder and file that always crashed just so I would have a baseline to test any "fix" against. I can replicate the problem AND the fix over and over.

 

[opuslife]

Hi all, glad I found this thread, 2nd xp machine with the same prob. First time, thought it was related to Photoshop 7, uninstalled it back to 6, prob seemed cured.
This time, brand new machine (using System Restore points during second load of software items, didn't expect prob with just Photoshop 6) I did not have the problem with Photoshop 4, but when I went to the Upgrade to 6, problem occurred. Currently used System Restore to return to Photoshop 4 problem free state.

Tried to reset/change/modify the file associations (with Photoshop 6 still installed, didn't seem to work, still killed Windows Explorer with any files having TIF or PSD images in them (thx by the way, wasn't sure what the offending file association issue was until I found this thread.)

Problem is, I really need the functions/capabilities of Photoshop 6 or 7, have 4 installed now... how do I again reinstall 6 without the problem rearing its' ugly head? Can I repopulate all of my TIFs and PSDs into a different directory? Rename them something else, extension-wise? These are possible workarounds for now, but what about when I need to be able to use TIF and / or PSDs again? What is the real problem here and a long term solution?

Regards and thanks, glad to find this site. Great posts on this, so far.

Bob Williams, Bristol RI, USA

 

[pete2eat]

opuslife: seems to me the easiest way is to reïnstall Ph 7 and to associate your photo-files to any kind of viewer (I use IrfanView, but a Windows-viewer(XP)will do). The only way left to open your files in Photoshop is to start Photoshop and open the file. Just like that. Good luck!

 

[LewfromTampa]

Pete2eat & others
I responded a couple of messages back and thought we had found the final work-around (getting rid of tif associations with PS7). At that time I could make a known folder repeatedly fail and then work by first associating the tifs and then dis-associating them with PS7.

THEN, a few days later the problem reappeard. This time the tif files weren't associated with PS7. And besides, there were no TIF files, only .psd. Out of nowhere several subfolders of images started crashing. I had about 5 subfolders under one parent directory. They had all been OK a few minutes before. Now 4 of the 5 were crashing Windows Explorer when I tried to open them. The one that wasn't crashing didn't have thumbnail view turned on, but the others did. I suspected the problem may have something to do with Explorer trying to display thumbnails because the first of this series of failures occurred while watching the thumbnails populate the screen. SO, this is where it stands now: I renamed the parent directory (which had always worked in the past). One thing this does is that it forces the subdirectories to lose their thumbnails. After renaming the parent, the subdirectories no longer crashed. So, I then named the parent directory back to its original name and let the thumbnails recreate themselves and all the folders have been stable since. Very strange problem.

 

[linney]

Howmany thumbnail files do you have in one folder? If we are talking of hundreds, maybe reducing the number of files below a couple of hundred may keep explorer from crashing.

 

[zofo00]

I find it surprising that during all this no one has mentioned that the problem may have been caused by the lack of space in the partition or drive where the folders are situated, As Adobe Photoshop requires a lot of free space available for it and the files associated with it are accessed....

[li]do all the files open on the desktop or do you do it one by one??[/li]

Just seeking a personal query for curiousities sake....
cheers
Zofo

 

[LewfromTampa]

Zofo00 & linney

You mentioned a couple of possible issues. The following applies to my situation (I'm assuming we all are experiencing the same problem):
1. The number of files (thumbnails) in a folder. I have had it crash with as few as one. The likelihood of crash doesn't seem to be related to the number of files.
2. The size of the partition and free space. I have one (1) partition of 200 GB, of which over 90% was free. As for RAM, I have 1.5 GB of which 80% is allocated to Photoshop.

I would like to make a point about possible Photoshop involvement (or lack of it). I have had crashes without having Photoshop running. I have even had crashes with .tif files I copied from a CD that was included with a Photoshop manual. Just selecting a particular .tif file (not doubleclicking) would crash Explorer. Granted the files were likely created by Photoshop, but not necessarily on my system. (In fact, now that I think about it, I have seen crashes with .tif files that were created by my slide scanner and no Photoshop running.

I have a question: Has anyone experienced this problem under Windows 98 or any OS other than XP?

 

[LewfromTampa]

Hi Folks,

I just found the following on Microsoft Support site. It sounds like it may (?) be our problem.

From Microsoft Support site

You Receive an Error Message When You Open a Folder with a .tif File
The information in this article applies to:
Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
Microsoft Windows XP Professional

This article was previously published under Q324474
SYMPTOMS
When you open a folder in Windows Explorer that contains a .tif file, Windows Explorer may generate an access violation, and may stop responding (hang) when it tries to display the thumbnail image.
CAUSE
This problem occurs with .tif files that contain many channels. In this case, the size of the SamplePerPixel value that is set in the file is larger than the GDIplus is expecting, which causes heap corruption. Windows Explorer stops responding the next time it references a field in this structure.
STATUS
Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed at the beginning of this article (XP Home and XP Pro)

 

[BooYaKaSha]

Interesting. But that makes alot of sense. Thanks for the info.

 

[pete2eat]

Hello everybody. I very much appreciate all the effort that is taken to solve this problem. Newest experience: As I told earlier I reïnstalled XP+SP1 and Ph.7 and without Photoshop-File-associations it works perfect. Reading all your new responses I tried to go to the limit with PhotoshopFileAss, .TIF Files with lots of layers and channels, creating dir's with over 1300 files in it and "nothing" happens! It's impossible to force Explorer to crash. I guess I have to wait till the phantom returns to be able to continue this thread.
LewfromTampa: I never had this prob with Win 98!

 

[ParallaxError]

All very interesting!

I had this problem on an office PC running XP Pro (SP1), but ignored it as it was so infrequent...

Now over the last few weeks I have the same problem at home (no direct connection between office and home, not even e-mail...) on an XP Home machine. Argh!

Definitely occurs when building icons/thumbnails - in any view type.

Virus scanned, no change.
Chkdsk, no change.
Re-installed XP, no change.
Un-installed several programs inc. Photoshop6, problem solved....

Suspect that the problem is in Explorer though this PC is 18 months old, has had PS6 on for the whole time... It seems to be the act of building the window with different icons (e.g. photoshop) that kills it as it does (would...) take about 2 minutes to show all icons with photoshop installed... 2 seconds without...

Also had the same failure when XP start menu is set to "show My Pictures as menu" and amazingly also in the standard API called windows like "save as..."

I now have a PC that I can back up files from Explorer to CD before I re-install another graphics package and try to work around it...

Any more thoughts gratefully received.

 

[manikm]

OK, i think i know what causes this.
When yuo say exporer crashes, do u mean, the machine appears to hang, and the CPU maxes out at 99%?

Its all down the file, DETAIL level. (i dont have XP in front of me), within Explorer, goto file, and detail, take off all the unneccsary details, such as dimension, just leave size and name, and date on.

Then this should fix it, make it for ALL folders.

 

[opuslife]

Great insights on this problem, thanks all. I am about to reinstall Photoshop 6 (back to PS4 at the moment with no problems.) But I am still stuck/unclear on one point: (Duh, that I haven't been able to fix yet)

Before I removed PS6, I tried to change the file associations for TIFFs to Microsoft Image Viewer or whatever it was and even after doing so, I was still seeing the Adobe Icon as Windows Explorer tried to open/render the file icons for TIFFs (as it crashed), so I uninstalled PS6 thinking that the problem was still there and associated with Adobe. The present condition is that, after the PS6 uninstall, the icons that show with the TIFs are not Adobe icons (some MS image icon that I had selected when fighting with this) and everything seems to work fine.

When I tried to install PS6 Upgrade before, I specifically remember trying to tell it NOT to associate TIFFs with Photoshop, and the problem occurred (with Adobe icons showing up) anyway.

What is the recommended method of doing the install/file association changes when I put PS6 back on? And/or other ideas to minimize the impact of this problem until a fix is identified?

I have way too many projects and programs with TIFFs to either try to change the directory names or make them 'something else'. That is simply not an option for me.

Bristol, RI, US

"When the going gets weird... the weird turn pro." Hunter S. Thompson

 

[LewfromTampa]

To All readers
I realize this thread is getting pretty long and maybe hard to follow from the beginning. I would like to summarize for some of the latest participants:
1. The "crash" isn't really a hang. Explorer says it must close and asks if you want to send a report to Microsoft. This occurs with either .psd and .tif files.
2. It appears Microsoft has identified the problem - no fix yet.
3. I have only found one tried-and-true work-around that works EVERY time. That is to rename the folder with the suspect file(s). This causes some kind of refresh of thumbnails or thumb.db file. Explorer then no longer crashes (for a while at least). Of course you can immediately rename the folder back to its original name.
4. Removing the association between .tif files and Photoshop did have a positive effect on the frequency of failures but didn't prevent the problem completely.
5. The problem only occurs with Windows XP (Home or Pro)

 

[edgewaterimages]

Hi I have been dealing with this explorer crash since last August. First with JPEG files and now with TIFF. I work almost exclusively with image files (photo studio). I have XP Home with Photoshop Elements (PSE) 1st release. My HP system has 512 RAM, 2.0 GH Pentium 4. My experience is that changing name of the file folder where the crash occurs makes the problem worse. Changing the file associations back to the Windows Picture and Fax View seemed to help with TIFF Files, but not JPEG files. I have also experienced this when using save as.. in PSE and when opening files from PSE. I typically experience the crash when viewing folders with image files while the thumbs are populating. TIFF's populate quickly, JPEG's very slowly. In addition to being asked to send the error report, (which doesn't alway happen... sometimes explorer just shuts down and restarts) I sometimes get an explorer application error "the instruction at 0x77f745cc referenced memory at 0x0005009 the memory could not be written" followed by a second application error "the instruction at 0x77f755e9 referenced memory at 0x00000014 the memory could not be read" I almost always get the event log "Faulting application explorer.exe, version 6.0.2800.1106, faulting module ntdll.dll, version 5.1.2600.1106, fault address 0x00002a84" Wish I had more to offer than a lot of co-miserating but thought you should know the work-arounds mentioned sometimes make matters worse.

 

[cheerio]

Forgive me for asking a stupid question.

If the problem is with Windows Explorer, has anyone tried switching to a third party file manager such as one of FileQuest XP, Powerdesk, Turbo browser, File commander, etc

Ken

 

[Kaisersos]

Hail,

Did we ever come up with a definitive answer for this thread? I dont have Photoshop on either of my affected win xp computers and I will have the typical close windows explorer and any active programs, rebuild system tray with some missing icons, usually use up 99% system resources on windows explorer etc.. etc...

This is completely a drag when transferring files between computers. Latest video drivers, plenty of HD space, NAV 2003 up to date, adaware scans up to date etc...

One other useful peice of info that might help some. I used to have win ME and would get a fatal error with win explorer open. Would get error in unknown and if i clicked that box the system tray would rebuild and often the system would crash. It would continue to work if I dragged the dialogue box to the side and didn't click on it. I upgraded to Win XP and at least dont have that fatal crash bug but just the same its annoying to basically be unable to use windows explorer and not find any real help for this prevalent problem on Microsoft or others help pages.

Any help appreciated. Thanks

Kaisersos

 

[BooYaKaSha]

As far as I'm concerned, since I turned off TIFF association with Adobe Photoshop, the problem has not resurfaced since (it's been about 3 months now I guess). But it seems like there is more than one issue on this thread, and different people are experiencing similar problems for different reasons.

I've also had problems with empty folders and closed files unable to be moved or deleted. This problem is 10x worse on network computers at work. I don't know if these issues are related at all, but Microsoft says they are aware of the problem.

Supposedly Service Pack 2 for XP will be out in a couple of months, and hopefully these issues will be resolved then. (?)

 

[ZapRowsdower]

I found this thread via google search. I am having the exact same problem. Here's my situation:

* BRAND NEW custom built computer (July 2004)
* Intel Pentium 4 CPU 3.0 GHZ
* 1 gig of RAM
* 1 120 gig hard drive, 70 gigs free
* Running Windows XP Pro (5.1 build 2600; Service Pack 2 installed)
* I have Photoshop 7
* Experienced crashes deep inside a folder (folder>subfolder>subfolder>subfolder), mostly with image files
* Re-associated image files with Windows Picture Viewer, (instead of PhotoShop) and problem still exists. (I have not yet installed/re-installed Photoshop yet though)
* There are only 5 images in one of the folders giving me problems
* Crash seems to happen when images were refreshing their thumbnails, so I checked the option "don't save thumbnails to cache" in Windows Explorer. I also changed all my folder views to "details" yet the problem still occurs.
* Scan Disk turns up nothing
* Spybot turns up nothing
* Virus Scan turns up nothing
* Re-installing XP is NOT an option, as I *just* did this when my computer was built.

So there we have it. SP2 didn't fix it... now what?

 

[ZapRowsdower]

Well, all be damned. I think I found a fix.

Find an image, right click it. Under the PHOTOSHOP tab, UNCHECK "generate thumbnail". I did that and my troubles are trouble no more... for now.