File Explorer oddities and unresponsive since 1809

1803 was working fine. Last night I (finally) got the upgrade pushed to me.
I had to reset a bunch of settings, very annoying.
I had to re-install one program. Why?
I had to re-add little hacks that make things work right.

For instance: I often open a bunch of images at once - highlight 20 or 30 in File Explorer and Enter and open them in my image editor. But for some reason if I highlight more than 15 images, nothing seems to happen. Except my Desktop wallpaper changes to one of the highlighted pictures. Like Microsoft thinks I want to change the folder for my Desktop wallpaper. Huh?

So I found a Registry entry to fix that. Which I had found before. Why does Microsoft erase such things when upgrading?

Today it happened again - opening 27 images and nothing happened and the wallpaper changed. I checked (Windows re-started the computer again overnight), but that Registry key was still there. Hmm.

The problem was that, among the 26 jpgs, there was one gif. Un-highlight that gif and the rest open fine. Or highlight the gif with only 14 or fewer jpgs and they all open fine. Huh? I don't know how to fix that. Can you help?

The thing that is really annoying me though is that File Explorer becomes unresponsive - without ever saying so.

I tried to delete a handful of items a few times. The delete window comes up and says it's "calculating" but it's not.
After using Task Manager to restart "Windows Explorer" a few times I noticed that if I highlighted four items, the red X (for deleting) in the File Explorer toolbar would go grey, and then I couldn't delete anything.
It's really frustrating and I'm hoping someone can help, but I'm just about to hit the Go Back button, because this is unusable.

Edit/Update: I just highlighted three files only and deleted using the red X. Now the red X is grey. Must restart Windows Explorer just to delete something else!

Thanks!

I run Classic Shell on 1809, no issues with it that I've noticed.

In any case those are the woes of feature updates, and sometimes even cumulative updates. I don't trust MS to make those painless and never will. That's why I don't do the semi-annual channel thing. I run a version until I can't run it anymore. I'm on 1809 now because I bought a new laptop computer, but I'll run that until I have to move up.

dalchina said:

Where you change things at the registry level you should not expect such changes to be necessarily retained: best but such things in a batch file or folder so you can readily repeat them, with any appropriate notes.

That is a really good idea. I think I will do that.

dalchina said:

Not seen anything like that, so I'm afraid I can't comment. Just tried it- no effect.

Happens every time for me, since buying this computer with Windows 10, about a year ago. Had the April 2017 version on it, so it's happened like that for each subsequent upgrade.

Your suggestions for fixing my problem are interesting, but before I heard from you, I started deleting the files I was having problems with - three at a time, and restarting Windows Explorer each time. Then one just would not delete and I thought that must be the problem. I used an UnLock IT to unlock it (!) but still couldn't delete it. That program has a Delete option, so I did that and it asked if I really wanted to delete this system file. It was a music file (flac) in my Downloads folder, so not a system file at all. When I said OK, it said it had to reboot to delete it. I hate rebooting because it takes so long, but I was so frustrated I said go ahead.

On reboot, everything works fine. I can delete multiple files - and even open more than 15 image files of various types (ie jpg and gif). So I guess a simple reboot was all it needed. Sometimes I forget that is often a cure ... sometimes I just don't want to because of how long it takes....

But thank you for your suggestions to fix this problem. I printed them out in case it happens again.

dalchina said:

One problem a number of Classic/Open Shell users have run into sometimes over the years is that using that can cause this (if you use it, have a look at the Classic Shell forum and search for explorer hang or explorer crash or procdump).

I remember when Windows 8 came out with it's weird interface, there was a third-party program that would emulate the Windows 7 interface. I thought it was called Classic Shell ... or something like that. I am not running that - Windows 10 has always displayed in an intuitive sort of way for me - different from the Win7 that I was used to, but not so different as Win8 was. But I see on my computer there is a bunch of Microsoft Classic Shell files. I don't know what that is, and not entirely certain if I am using it. And not sure if you are referring to that, or the third-party software I mentioned.

(Those files are in sub-folders of a folder called Windows.old, so maybe are not even being used? Isn't that the Go Back folder?)

Classic Shell moved to Open Shell after the original author discontinued work. It went to open source and they didn't change it much other than some bug fixes. I would not be a happy Windows user without it.

I don't find the win10 start menu very efficient at all, it's more like a less usable "cow goes moo" version of the original start menu. Never saw the horror that was Windows 8 so no opinion on that.

It seems the big revolution in user interfaces is to use clunky tiles instead of lists. That's a step backwards in my opinion. At one point they tried doing that with Chrome's bookmarks manager and everyone had such a cow about it they went back to the list style. I sure was happy about that.

In general, it seems the opinion with software engineers is change advances the state of the art whether it's for the good or not.