Windows Explorer keeps stopping on my Sage server

[wayner]

I just built a new Sage server a few weeks ago. Everything works pretty well except Windows Explorer stops responding on a fairly regular occurrence, especially if I am browsing my TV recordings folder. Does anyone else see this?

My OS is Win7 Pro 32 bit, my CPU is an i5-660 and I have 3 GB of RAM. The recorded TV drive is a new Seagate 2TB.

I copied over recordings from my old server so my TV folder has several hundred files, but that shouldn't be an issue.

[Spectrum]

I used to get explorer hangs "back in the day" with some of the old nvidia drivers that would scan for an external display every time a media file was selected. That has since been taken care of and if you are using the i5's GPU nvidia drivers are a non-issue I would be suspicious of that 2TB drive if the problem occurs more frequently when accessing it that anywhere else. Download Seatools from Seagate's website and run a short test on the drive and see if it passes. If it doesn't get your data off ASAP and RMA the drive. If it does pass, run the long test and still be suspicious of the drive until you get things sorted.

This being a new build, if the hard drive is not the issue, you may want to run memtest for 12-24 hours and prime95 for another 12-24 to check the stability of the memory and cpu.

[wayner]

I am using the i5's GPU which is an Intel. I tried the Seatool short test without problems. I am not 100% sure that it is the disk but I will continue to try your ideas - thanks for your help.

[Nelbert]

Have you got a virus scanner running?

What happens if you leave the machine for 10-15 mins after Explorer stops responding? Does it recover?

[wayner]

I have Mcafee running now, but I don't think I did when I first started having these problems. Explorer usually will recover on its own if I give it the time.

[Nelbert]

If you start task manager, show processes for all users and sort by CPU usage and just leave it running.

When explorer stops responding task manager might show a particular process as using 100% cpu.

If it's not an actual hardware issue, then it sounds like something is kicking in and taking 100% cpu usage, with the length of time explorer is "not responding" being proportional to the size and number of files and folders in that location.

You don't have any old drive mappings or file shortcuts to non-existant servers or network locations do you? If not a process taking all the resources, it could be explorer trying to resolve something to a network server which doesn't exist anymore. Although I'd expect that just to time out for 30-60 seconds before giving up.

[wayner]

There shouldn't be any bad mappings as this is a new PC that only had the OS installed a couple of weeks ago. I did temporatily map to some drives on my old server which is now shutdown.

Explorer seems to be behaving better now when I have the TV Shows drive open, but at times it would be very slow when I wanted to resort the main folder - say by date rather than filename, and you could see that it was reading filenames as the green line was growing around where the address bar is.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by wayner

There shouldn't be any bad mappings as this is a new PC that only had the OS installed a couple of weeks ago. I did temporatily map to some drives on my old server which is now shutdown.

Explorer seems to be behaving better now when I have the TV Shows drive open, but at times it would be very slow when I wanted to resort the main folder - say by date rather than filename, and you could see that it was reading filenames as the green line was growing around where the address bar is.

Are you sure you removed all the drive mappings before they became unavailable? You may want to check.

1. Right-click My Computer, and then click Disconnect Network Drive.
2. In the Disconnect Network Drive dialog box, click the letter of the drive that you want to disconnect, and then click OK.
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 until all offline network drives are disconnected. If you are not sure about a particular drive, follow these steps:

Click Start, and then click Run.
In the Open box, type the following, and then press ENTER\\computer name\share name

where computer name is the name of the server that is sharing the resource, and share name is the name of the shared resource that you want to use.

If the resource is not available, you receive an error message that is similar to the following:
The network name cannot be found.

[Spectrum]

The easiest way to blow out all your mapped drives is from a command prompt (elevated command prompt if you have UAC enabled) run

net use * /delete

After accepting the are you sure squawk it will disconnect you from any foreign network mappings. This will remove all network drives, so be sure that is what you want to do before you do it

On another note, how many files/folders do you have on that drive? I have noticed on Win7 that it chokes when resorting large numbers of items. I have a directory that has ~350 files/folders and if I change the sort order it takes awhile for it to come back (10+ seconds for changing sort by name to sort by date and I get the green bar you were describing) but I've never had it crash explorer on me...

[gplasky]

The other thing to check is to make sure Windows 7 isn't set to power down your drives in a short amount of time. I've seen this before.

Gerry

[Spectrum]

Interesting tidbit I just found. I dug into the slow sorts and found that if I right clicked the folder, went to the customize tab, and set the folder optimization to general files instead of video files, sorts by date were fast again. I don't know what get's changed with that setting and I don't really care, just glad not to have to wait for sorts

[wayner]

Originally Posted by Spectrum

On another note, how many files/folders do you have on that drive? I have noticed on Win7 that it chokes when resorting large numbers of items. I have a directory that has ~350 files/folders and if I change the sort order it takes awhile for it to come back (10+ seconds for changing sort by name to sort by date and I get the green bar you were describing) but I've never had it crash explorer on me...

There are 1600 files on the drive - recordings in addition to some .edl files, .log files, .my files and .properties files. I don't know what is (was) creating the .my files but I will nuke them as they don't seem to have been created since Dec 1. I can also nuke the .properties files and tell BMT not to recreate them.

I have just deleted some of the unneeded files and am now down to 850 files or so - we will see how we do with that.

[Bizarroterl]

I'm seeing this problem also. Details:
Win 7 Pro x64 set up under ESXi 4. ESXi box is plenty fast with 8GB of ECC RAM. Hard drives are all SSD. The Win 7 client is assigned 3GB of ram, but typical usage is 800MB-1GB.

The Win 7 client is my SageTV server. It has SageTV, MyMovies collection management (server), HDHomeRun software, CuteFTP Pro, and VMWare tools.

I don't use this box to browse the internet. I do access one site with CuteFTP Pro to download some files and upload backups. The only other internet access is Sage & MyMovies. Firewall is off, no VM, no Windows Defender.

Access is almost exclusively via a RDP connection. Event log shows nothing unusual.

When this happens Win. Explorer is totally unresponsive. Double clicking on My Computer does nothing. Performance in Task manager does show CPU & kernel times of ~40% which is unusual. To recover I have to reset the machine via the ESXi management console.

I've just started to look into this problem as it happens only infrequently.

Edit: Also, I have 2 partitions. One is the OS and the other is for Sage. I'm evaluating Sage and thus have very few files on that partition.

[razrsharpe]

one thing you might want to check out is buggy programs adding right click context menu options to windows explorer....

Skirge (while debugging a different problem) said this, so that might be worth digging into as well.

Originally Posted by Skirge01

I then focused on the ImageTransforms folder, mentioned by razr. When right-clicking on that folder or SageTV's folder, I was getting a heap error and explorer.exe was crashing. So, I researched that and found that programs adding right-click options can cause this. I saw VLC and ZipGenius listed and decided to uninstall them. That fixed the right-click issue.