OK, odd problem... When clicking (double left or single right) on a file, PC hangs!

[NeilF]

If I go to any file on my C drive and double click it, or even just right click it once, the desktop basically hangs!

If I do the same to any file on my D or E drive, all is fine.

My C and D drive are actually the same (partitioned) drive.

I've done a complete checkdsk etc, and no problems...

The machine boots fine, runs fine, and I can run stuff from the C drive as long as I use the START option instead of going through MyComputer for example.


When I had something similar to this MANY years ago on a different machine it affected all files and turned out to be Nortons stupid recycle bin add on... It had added on some stupid file property attribute!?

But the machine in question this time has next to nothing installed on it, and this problem has seemingly only just started happening, and only on C?

Anyone experienced anything like this?

 

[modo77]

Very odd, how is it in safe mode?

 

[NeilF]

Very odd, how is it in safe mode?

Not thought of that... I'll try it tonight...

My gut feel is that it has to be the context menu thingy again like I had on another machine years ago. But what I don't understand is how that would ONLY affect the C drive!?

I've downloaded a program called ShellExView which can show all the "Context Menu" associations... You can then disable them as well... I'll try using that and maybe use FileMon to try and see what the machine is actually trying to access/use when right clicking on a file. I believe this is how I diagnosed the problem many years ago when Norton was the cause!


God I ******* hate computers!

 

[NeilF]

Right! It was AVG!

THe PC wasn't crashing, but hanging for about a minute (bear in mind this is quite an old low spec machine).


I ran FileMon on the system, and when I went to the C drive in explorer and did anything I could see "explorer:1300" reading through the file "C:". It would read in chunks equating to hundreds and hundreds of meg.

When I uninstalled AVG all was fine. Put AVG back, problem occured again.


What was odd, was no file was referenced, just "C:". I would have expected a specific file to be listed in filemon, but instead it was progressively reading hundreds of meg of space from "C:".

So I figured maybe a file or something was corrupt and AVG/Explorer was leaking into a daft search/open, so I did a PerfectDisc defrag and even used PartitionMagic to change the partition size to try and kick and tables/files into place.

The problem wasn't cured, but it did change. The hundreds of meg read was now down a single specific file, my XP SP2 executable that I happened to have in the main route of C. When I moved this to D:, the problem was cured for C, but now occured on D, with FileMon showing hundreds of meg being read in on this file.

If I moved the file to a sub directory, ALL OK!


So I think AVG has changed over the past few weeks/months so it's more scanny... And maybe if you have a large file (executable?, on a main route?), it now can hang the machine while it scans it.