I have windows 8, and whenever I click on the “downloads” folder, it takes forever to open up, compared to other folders. Sometimes, it doesn’t open up at all. I leave it on the background, and it seems to sponge up all of the computer’s resources in a desperate attempt to try and open itself up.
What’s going on? Is there a virus? A bad icon file? Too many files? Something else? Is there a way to rule out possibilities and make it work again?
If you have a lot of large files it could be your antivirus going a bit nutty. If you move a lot of the large binaries to folders somewhere else it will speed things up a lot.
Windows 7 and 8 also both will often try to view thumbnails for all of the files in your download folder. If you set the type of folder to general it will just display the file names and won’t try to make thumbnails out of every file.
I’ve encountered similar behavior in Windows 7, and, to a lesser extent in XP. Every time it was for a folder that either had a bunch of videos (a couple dozen) or pictures (a couple hundred).
Also, windows will tend to choke if you’ve got just one video or picture particular that’s not properly encoded/formatted (the headers describing the media streams (video, audio, subtitles) are missing, corrupt, or just plain wrong (e.g. file headers say the video is encoded as divx when it’s really an H.264 video stream). So yes, a bad icon file could be causing the behavior you describe but that’s rather rare. Too many files or an improperly packaged video file are your most likely culprits.
I’ve been seeing this problem on Windows XP platforms, and I think on Windows 7 too. What I’ve noticed is, it’s always the Desktop folder. Which is bad, because I commonly have to navigate my way through that to get to other places I want, and I have to sit there at WAIT for it to finish before I can click down into another folder.
And I see it happening even when it’s a shared folder and I’m looking at it from another machine.
The involved folders in my machine really don’t have a whole lot of stuff in them. But the Desktop has lots of shortcuts and lots of seemingly “special” stuff (like the Recycle Bin, and the My Computer icon, stuff like that) and I always wondered if there was a problem with that.
The possible problems mentioned earlier in this thread give me some ideas I could try playing with to try to stop this.
The amount of time taken is also proportional to the amount of files present, even if the thumbnails already exist. I know this “should never come up”, but I’ve seen it several times: Windows Explorer tends to choke if a single folder contains 30k or more files. So how many files are in it? Is there a way to remove them, or put them into subfolders?
Other possible causes: your anti-virus going nuts over a .zip file contain thousands of tiny files. A corrupt video file that causes the Windows Service that creates thumbnails to become unresponsive and crash. (Potentially could happen with an image file too, if the image were huge enough.)
It could potentially be an issue with the HD itself-- maybe you only notice it with the Downloads folder because that’s the folder your OS has to actually talk to the disk to get (other folder listings tend to stay cached in memory when used frequently.) In that case it could be a whole host of other causes… I’ve seen disks get downgraded to PIO mode after DMA failures, and man is that a slow computer.
I agree with all this.