Rightclicking: Feeze
 

I have the symptom since some days that when I rightclick on a folder to open the context menue, the cursor changes from arrow to egg timer and then the system somewhat freezes. No more clicks on other folders, left or right-clicking, are accepted. If I am lucky, I can use CTRL-ALT-DELETE to open the task manager, and close the folder there (which is listed as ";no reply/keine Rückmeldung". Else I must reboot via reset-button. System is Windows XP, new installed just some weeks ago. Scanners found no problem. Ideas?

Happens on all files you attempt to work with?

No, it is a random event. most of the time I'm fine. I noticed it first when trying to empty the waste bin, and getting locked out. After reboot, things were fine. Then I realised that eventually folders cannot be accessed, too.

One theory of mine is that some background process may be running. I searched for one suspect, but found none. That does not mean that I know all the things running in the background on my system.

I scanned via AntiVirus software, AdAware, Spybot S&D, A-squared, and cleaned the registry. Security is handled restrictive over here.

Sounds like the indexer.

Try killing the indexing service and see if this takes care of it. Make sure you disable it vs just turning it to manual or stopping it. The xp indexer was horrible. Its not much better in vista or 7 - but in 7 its easy to take out - and its killable in both vista and xp.

I found the index service under "local services", and switched it to "deactivated". It already was off, and switched to manual launch anyway.

I do not know what it does and what it is, but I will see if something changed for the better.

Sounds like a third party app that you added is hosing up your system. That is the symptom of something that has added it self to the Explorer context menu system and is crashing upon you right clicking something.

So what weird app did you install around the time when the symptom started? Uninstall anything that adds itself to this menu and move on from there.

-S

Solution : don't right click anything:D

Seriously, try Sysinternals autoruns to see what context menu handlers you have added to your system. Uninstalling programs won't always get rid of the registry entries for the handlers and can cause problems. With autoruns, you can disable any that could be problematic to see if this solves your problem.

I tried that Autoruns software, but the results it produces are beyond my knowledge, for the most. the huge majority of things it lists I do not know, and thus deleting anything there would be like Russian roulette. The information I get simply is beyond my computer skills.

But thanks anyway.

What qualities or features did I lose by deactivating the indexer? Does it produce any accumulating, potentially negative side-effect?

You don't have to delete anything to see if you can find the problem. Look at the sections that end in "ContextMenuHandlers" and you can deactivate any of the entries just by unchecking them. Look through those entries for something that you may have installed or uninstalled about the time the problem started.

The indexer does nothing more than make an index of what files are where on your pc. This is used to speed up the "find - files or folder" search - so you lose nothing unless your always searching for files using that function.

:up: