Whenever I open my folder that has all my MP3s in it my CPU usage goes up to 100%. A program called ‘explorer.exe’ takes up about 95% of my CPU usage and even after I close the MP3 folder that program still runs. When I manually shut it down I end up crashing windows and having to restart the computer.
I know explorer.exe has useful functions, but it sounds like I have a virus instead. I have tried spybot, adaware, cwshredder, microsoft antispyware beta & AVG and none can detect or remove whatever is doing this damage. So it is even a virus, or is it something else? What can I do about it?
Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom :rolleyes: decided to very tightly couple explorer into their operating system, so any time there is a problem with explorer, it is ver likely to bring the entire system down with it. Any time you are opening a folder, you are using explorer. A lot of times explorer runs in the background, doing things that only Microsoft really knows for certain what it is doing.
When you open up your folder, explorer is going to look at every single MP3 file in there so that it can give you all sorts of “useful” information about the file. I’m not sure, but depending on how you have your preferences set in windows media player, it may even go out onto the internet and try to get more information about each file. It might be worthwhile setting up media player so that it never accesses the internet and see if that helps.
I think it’s more likely that something nasty has latched onto explorer. In my experience, even if you are good with computers, you can spend days and days trying to extract something evil once it has latched onto explorer. It’s usually easier to back up everything important and re-install windows.
explorer.exe is, as mentioned, very vital to windows. It is basically what MS calls its file system. When ever you open up a file its explorer.exe that is doing that. Cancelling the process is what is causing your desktop to crash. Explorer.exe is always running. Reboot your system, when its up, look at your processes, explorer.exe will be there. You should basically never stop this process.
My guess as to why its going to 100% is because you have a lot of mp3s and to open a file that big requires a lot of work from the processor.
The file browser in windows will display the meta data from mp3 files. (the id3 tags with song name etc.). Do you have a lot of mp3 files all in 1 directory? Perhaps the problem is that the file browser needs to scan all those mp3 files when you open the folder.
Explorer.exe is, in fact, the process that displays your desktop, folders, etc. When you shut it down, you shut down a major part of Windows. Depending on what Windows you have, you may crash Windows itself. You will certainly cause some major UI features to reload.
Explorer “goes nuts” because MS provided you with a “feature” that gives you lots of extra info about MP3s when you open a folder containing them. If you’re curious about this, open a folder (mebbe one that does not have MP3s :)), switch the view to Detail (menu View > Detail) and then right-click on any column heading. You should see check marks next to the displayed attributes/columns, and then towards the bottom a bunch of attributes/columns that look like they only apply to music. It’s that info that Explorer is trying to retrieve when it looks at the folder.
You see something similar happen when you open a folder that contains pictures. By default, Explorer opens a thumbnail view of the folder, and that takes time.
My suggestion is to wait several minutes once you open the MP3 folder. I know that Explorer caches info for picture folders; it may do the same for MP3 folders. That means you have to wait a long time only once.
First I would ask: do you have an always-on internet service, and (if so) does this always happen, or does it just happen when networking is enabled? Because many spyware programs are only active when networking connections are available. At least once you should physically disconnect your network connection and reboot and try it, and see if it still happens.
You might install and run HijackThis and post the log in a tech forum. Your computer might have something, but it might only take two minutes to remove. How much time would you spend reformatting?
Also I would check–have you purchased and inserted any of the “invisible-sys” Sony CD’s that install invisible programs? There was like 57 different CD titles that had them. Different places have patches to fix it and MS claims to have a patch out that prevents it from happening again but if you’ve already got it installed, you need to get rid of that first.
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Also, um, did you know that in XP, you can restart a process? Next time this happens, press ctrl-alt-delete, and “kill” explorer.exe, and your desktop goes blank. It’s supposed to do that. Then switch to the “applications” tab and hit the “new task” button, and enter “C:/windows/explorer.exe” , -or you know, wherever your windows install is, explorer.exe is in the windows folder…
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I think 633squadron has nailed it; it’s explorer.exe (which is not the same thing as Internet Explorer) getting all the info on the files in the folder that is slowing you down.
There’s one very important question: when you say “the folder that has all my mp3s in it”, exactly how many mp3s are we talking here? Because if it’s in the hundreds or thousands, and they’re all in the same folder, then that certainly will clobber your computer each time you open the folder.
Assuming you do have huge numbers of mp3s in one folder, how to fix it? Only one way - you need to put them in a neat folder system so that explorer isn’t having to check hundreds of files all at the same time. If your mp3s are all nicely tagged, you could get a utility like mp3tag, which can rename all your mp3s into a nice tree structure, one folder for each artist/album and so forth. If they’re not nicely tagged, though, using this could be disastrous, so you might have to sort things out manually. Realistically, this is the only way to speed things up, as even if explorer does cache the file info as 633squadron suggests, it’s still going to have to refresh it every time you get some new mp3s, reboot the computer, and so forth.
If that sounds like too much hard work, the alternative is to browse your mp3s using either WinAmp or Media Player, both of which have Library functions that remember what mp3s you’ve got on your computer for quick(er) browsing. Then you just have to avoid opening your music folder. Ever.
Well by the sounds of it, the OP has a heck of a lot of files in one folder. Since a file browser will inevitably take up processing power with (at least) a linear relationship to the number of files it’s displaying, this is hardly Microsoft’s fault but is rather an intrinsic problem of a) wanting a nice GUI which gives you useful information, and b) having shedloads of files in one place. So it’s not a bug, nor a feature, it’s just a fact of life. Listing large directories in Unix can take a while, too, even at the command line. Sometimes it really isn’t the software’s fault.
Quartz, I suspect that since those views display even more metadata, switching to them is in fact going to make things slower. Having played around a bit, I also think that Windows holds off loading the icons for any files that aren’t visible in the folder until you scroll to them, so arguably the small-icons views put more load on the computer in that way, too.
Around 1600 files totaling 10GB. This normally doesn’t happen though, it only started a week or two ago. And the CPU stays at 100% whenever I do it. And I know explorer.exe is necessary but I have heard that that filename is used by some viruses and worms.
Killing explorer.exe (assuming it’s the real thing, not a trojan masquerading under that name) doesn’t kill the desktop, and doesn’t stop applications running. While typing this, I’ve killed explorer.exe (right-click and ‘end process’) in Task Manager. You can then go to File - New Task (Run), and enter ‘explorer’. Your taskbar reappears.
I figure it is a trojan or something. I have 10GB of files in my folder, but I’ve had that many for years and this problem didn’t start until a few weeks ago.
Well, to be exact, if you do an “end process” on explorer.exe, your desktop will disappear. Your application programs will continue to run (You can use ALT+TAB to go to running applications), but you won’t be able to access the Start menu or Quick Launch or System Tray.
So “killing” is perhaps the wrong term; mebbe “transporting into an alternate dimension” is better?
You can use CTRL+ALT+DEL to bring up the Task Manager, and select File Run (as noted) to run explorer.exe again.
How long does the CPU stay at 100%? 20 seconds? Three hours?
Did you add any files to your giant folder a week or two ago?
It won’t hurt to check for viruses, of course, but this doesn’t sound like a virus to me. It sounds like Windows Explorer is trying to read directory data or meta-data for a recently-added file, and choking for some reason. The thumbnail preview for image files sometimes does something similar if Explorer has trouble reading the image file due to a file format mixup or a corrupt image file. In that case, Explorer gives up after a few minutes.
I just tried this on my machine. For a folder with about 83 MP3s and no attached file information, CPU usage hit at about 33%. For a folder containing 26 MP3s with attached information (album art, titles, etc.), CPU usage hit 45%. In both cases though, it went back down after a second.
For reference, iexplore.exe is Internet Explorer – that one you can safely kill with no remorse should you find it running when you do not want it so.
What kind of information does Task Manager give you when this is going on? I’m guessing that you are using it to determine that your CPU is at 100%. When you look at the Processes tab, what’s the Mem Usage of explorer.exe?
What processor do you have, which version of Windows, and how much RAM?
