File Explorer hangs on "working on it" & Open As menu crashes

Thanks for answering! I do have 4 folders (not shortcuts) on my desktop for "Games", "Music", "Videos" and "Other stuff". Gonna look into it and report back later!

Thanks for the replies!

Starting with this one and I'll see if the problem still pops up in the next few days:

Callender said:

Change Folder Template in Windows 10
Turn off automatic folder type discovery.
Option Three / Item 3
Then manually change all library templates.

Then clear thumbnail cache and reboot.

Clear and Reset Thumbnail Cache in Windows 10

So I just ran the .bat under option 3 for "general items". Screen flicked for a sec and explorer reloaded. Was that enough to disable automatic folder type discovery? or did I need to do another step too?

Also, I cleared my thumbnail cache (420MB) and rebooted my PC.

Thanks again.

Hi Chiffon
What are You willing to open with"open with"
Mayby the "open With " thing "file or directory" needs administration right to get it done
Donload AdvancedRun from Nirsoft,
This can run anything as administrator ,Trustedinstaller ,etc
Mayby something got wrong when installing , or mayby You got a virus
icy

Hi everybody. Still having the problem unfortunately! So I reinstalled IrfanView and made sure the file associations were unchecked before uninstalling.

Anyway, I caught it while it was just popping up. (1 day and 18 hours uptime) It began with just the loading bar at "This PC" and the Open With option was not crashing yet for any files. While this was beginning, I noticed that half? of my images (all types) spread across multiple folders were not loading within Windows default Photos app... all I got was a blank window. However, if I checked "Always show icons, never thumbnails" (https://i.imgur.com/EiwYnAi.png) in the file explorer options, it kinda remedied the problem at the time, but only some of the affected images could load, not all. One picture in particular was a reference to what QuickAccess folders I had pinned since clearing the cache also removed your pins. Thumbnails disabled = Microsoft Photos app will show it. Also, that setting stopped the loading bar too at the time.

After playing with that setting and checking back & forth to confirm that the setting was actually allowing those images to be loaded, I decided to try deleting thumbnail cache to see if it'll help at all and I don't know if it was a coincidence, but that caused the whole problem to go out full force and start crashing my "open with" menu for every single file type. This includes txt, all audio, images, videos, even archives like rar and zip.

Not 100% sure, I think I'm leaning toward some file(s) are just tripping explorer.exe and this will be a long process figuring out which is causing it. (Since the issue doesn't immediately pop up after boot up, it's gotta be files right? We're talking 1-5 days before explorer starts freaking out)

This post in particular kinda gives me hope since it's the same symptoms. (although my downloads folder is clean lol)
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...8-edc8a4e8b359

For now, I'm gonna check every folder manually for thumbnail corruption and maybe move things to my external drive and temporarily delete them on my main drive.

As always, thanks for the replies! If any ideas come to mind, feel free to post. It's 100% appreciated.

- - - Updated - - -

UPDATE:
I dug through everything and changed each folder to show thumbnails one by one while watching the "open as" menu and the loading bar. I managed to trip it fairly quick a few times (thumbnails would stop loading, "open as" begins crashing, long load for "This PC", etc), however when I return to the same folder that I stopped at to reboot the computer, it just loads like normal. Also back tracked and checked each folder multiple times.

I was viewing things like image files, MP3s, FLACs, etc. Anything that could hold thumbnail data.

I believe I've loaded every thumbnail on my PC... and manually scrolled through EVERY folder (including the ones that I rebooted at) and also searched "jpg", "jpeg", "png", "bmp", "gif", "mp3", "flac", "wmv", "flv", "mkv", "webm", "avi" and other things with search result showing large icons and I didn't encounter anything.

This is where my thumbnail size sits at now.


I'm unsure what's next, this was my last idea. I've backtracked through every folder, including the ones where I ended up rebooting my PC at and they all ended up loading just fine.

I guess it's the waiting game again. But I wonder if it's hardware or OS file related problem now.

Any suggestions appreciated. Thanks.