…three I found in one search. It helps to include or spec Win 8, because the problem began then and has continued to 10.
All of the “This fixed it!” and “Solved!” flags are good humor, at best. Some of the solutions fix the problem some of the time for some of the users… no more. There does not appear to be a consensus on the cause and fix for most users.
I am very, very experienced at mucking around down to system levels, and tracking bugs, and very motivated to find a solution for this that either prevents the problem or reliably fixes it, and I have been stumped for close to three weeks now. I am not the only one, and some of the people raging about it are more advanced OS/debugging experts than I am.
Thanks. It sounds very similar to a problem I experienced with large image files in Windows XP - I’d dump them in a folder on the desktop for convenience, then find I could not move or delete the folder because ‘another program is using this file’ - it turned out to be Explorer.exe - and in particular, it was locking the files while it was trying to generate thumbnails of them for the view in Windows Explorer.
It may be that disabling thumbnails could solve this.
There are a number of different ways to disable thumbnails - if you want to do it for PDFs only, it requires a registry hack, but you could try creating a folder and just turning off all thumbnails for that folder - then test by saving your PDFs there and see if the problem persists.
There’s a video tutorial here on turning off thumbnails - if you click the ‘apply’ button in that dialog, it only changes the folder you are in. If you click ‘apply to folders’, it does it to all folders of the type.
Since I work with big files, I’m familiar with how much the system can bog down trying to generate a thumbnail for a 50-meg TIFF. In this case, though, all the PDFs I create are optimized for fast viewing, which speeds preview imaging in Explorer etc., and previews appear more or less instantly even for large files. Windows also doesn’t try to create tile/icon images for PDFs, just the PDF filetype logo.
But I’ll poke at this a little more. Maybe the thumbnail generator is stuck in some kind of loop, doing a job it doesn’t know doesn’t need doing…