Unexplained hangups in Explorer

[Gary Fritz]

What causes mystery hangups in the Windows Explorer?

I'm running XP Home on a 3.0 GHz system with 2GB of RAM. Sometimes
Explorer will get into a state where almost any action -- scrolling the
foler listing in the left pane, selecting a new folder, etc -- locks up the
Explorer for anywhere from 10sec to a minute or more. Often opening a new
Explorer window will get around the problem for a while (the new Explorer
works fine while the old one is still hung), but generally the new one will
get hung up before long too.

Task Manager says the CPU is idle; System Idle Process is taking up 95% or
more. System Monitor doesn't show any increase in disk activity (looking
at Avg Disk Queue Length, Disk Reads/sec, Disk Writes/sec, and Pages/sec).
As far as I can tell NOTHING is happening, but the Explorer just sits
there, hung, until it decides to run again. Why?

A somewhat-similar-but-unrelated issue: often when I pull down the Address
bar in Explorer (to select a different disk or quickly navigate up), it
hangs up for several (5-10) seconds. I'm assuming this is because it has
to hit all disks for some reason, and some of them are dormant and have to
spin up first. True? Or is something else going on?

Thanks!
Gary

 

[Gary Fritz]

Ah -- I may have figured out the cause right after posting my question.

I often connect to a client network with a VPN connection. I was on the
VPN when I experienced those hangs this morning. I tried closing the VPN
connection and shazam: no problems in Explorer.

Some of the objects in the Explorer folder listing (network drives, etc)
are on my local LAN, and thus are inaccessible while I'm on the VPN. Even
though I was doing no more than scrolling the folder listing, maybe
Explorer was trying to touch the drives somehow and hanging until it gave
up?

If that's it, is there any way to get around it other than closing the VPN
connection? I have to be on the VPN a lot, and Explorer is almost unusable
in this state.

Gary

 

[Patrick Keenan]

What causes mystery hangups in the Windows Explorer?

I'm running XP Home on a 3.0 GHz system with 2GB of RAM. Sometimes
Explorer will get into a state where almost any action -- scrolling the
foler listing in the left pane, selecting a new folder, etc -- locks up
the
Explorer for anywhere from 10sec to a minute or more. Often opening a new
Explorer window will get around the problem for a while (the new Explorer
works fine while the old one is still hung), but generally the new one
will
get hung up before long too.

Task Manager says the CPU is idle; System Idle Process is taking up 95% or
more. System Monitor doesn't show any increase in disk activity (looking
at Avg Disk Queue Length, Disk Reads/sec, Disk Writes/sec, and Pages/sec).
As far as I can tell NOTHING is happening, but the Explorer just sits
there, hung, until it decides to run again. Why?

A somewhat-similar-but-unrelated issue: often when I pull down the
Address
bar in Explorer (to select a different disk or quickly navigate up), it
hangs up for several (5-10) seconds. I'm assuming this is because it has
to hit all disks for some reason, and some of them are dormant and have to
spin up first. True? Or is something else going on?

Thanks!
Gary

Look again with Process Explorer rather than Task Manager. this wll give
you a *much* better idea of what is actually happenng.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/ProcessExplorer.mspx

I have seen failing drives cause slowdowns like this.

HTH
-pk

 

[Gary Fritz]

Look again with Process Explorer rather than Task Manager. this wll
give you a *much* better idea of what is actually happenng.

I'm not seeing anything more happening with Process Explorer. A percent of
CPU here, half a percent there, but System Idle Process is still accounting
for 95% or more of the CPU when the Explorer hangs. Exactly the same as
when the Explorer isn't hung.

I have seen failing drives cause slowdowns like this.

Hm, possible. But as I mentioned in my second post, I think it may be
related to the VPN. I'm not 100% certain on that, but it does seem to come
and go with the VPN connection.

Gary