Anyone ever have this? (windows & everything is an icon)

[Zecherieh]

I seem to install something, every time I reformat my computer - that makes it so all gifs, jpgs, html, txt, and god knows what else actually appears as the icon for itself.

Cool in theory I suppose - but in reality - its annoying the piss out of me (the last two times I reformated was because of this).

If you have never had this, imagine you open up a folder in windows - you are looking at it in detail view - to the left where you have your icons for each different file type - instead of a little gif icon, you get a little 16x16 image the gif.

Neat huh.

-- begin rant --

Now imagine opening up a folder that has a thouand gifs in it. You think it takes a bit of time for them to load in thumbnail mode - try it in list mode when you can fit oh so much more on the screen - - and if I am lucky, thats the worse of it - just waiting an hour for each folder to open - I always end up with one or two folders that I can never open again - because it crashes when I do.

-- end rant --


Anyone ever seen this, heard of this? I have no clue what the heck is causing it. I have been through the registry, sat here and watched through spy and debugger tools to try to locate what and where it is being cause from - and for one of the first times in my life - a stupid computer whatever, that has to be as simple (I think) as one damn registry edit or one dll change - and it has me stumped.

[chrispadfield]

That's windows XP by default. If you view in thumbnail view then clearly you will see thumbnails. Not sure exactly what you want to change.

[DirectPixel]

What type of hardware are you running? I've had not problem on my machine with folders containing 10,000+ files.

[Wayne Luke]

Run Windows Explorer (WINKEY-E) then goto Tools -> Folder Options -> View. Make sure "Do not cache thumbnails" is unchecked. Will load faster for you but will take up more storage space for the thumbnail database in each folder.

[Zecherieh]

This should describe it better than I did (dont know why i didnt think of this before)

And Wayne Luke - I actually have tried the opposite - this part of a screenshot should explain better - and notice they are gif files.

[Zecherieh]

That's windows XP by default. If you view in thumbnail view then clearly you will see thumbnails. Not sure exactly what you want to change.

See above - I aint in thumbnail mode - I get basically thumbnail mode, in detail, list, icon, and tile modes also - just my thumbnails are whatever size they would normally be for that display.

[Zecherieh]

What type of hardware are you running? I've had not problem on my machine with folders containing 10,000+ files.

Well, it was good two years ago

2.53 ghz - 1gig of ram (stupid max on this damn board) - 3 120gig harddrives (with about 4 gigs available between them ) -5000 megabites down - three screens -

its not the hardware

[Zecherieh]

To put it in perspective of how annoying this is - I have had explorer crash on me at least 40 times today so far (and I live on the west coast - so its only 10:40)

Normally I do not do this much graphics stuff - but have been working on http://sportsforum.ws/index.php?styleid=43 (new design, somewhat) - so I have to pull my nose out of visual studio and hunt around for graphics and such when I need them - and its killing me

[CeleronXT]

Doesn't Photoshop include this functionality?

[tgillespie]

Doesn't Photoshop include this functionality?

Thats what I was thinking. Do you have Photoshop installed?

[Zecherieh]

Nope - I try to stay Adobe Free

But at least it gives me some place to look - might be something pdf or the like related (though I dont have it installed now, have installed it when I needed it)

[Zecherieh]

Thought it might be SVG - wasn't, and I uninstalled quicktime, and everything else I could think that it might be - other than Imagemagik - which I dont want to uninstall - but might need to at least find out if its the problem.

[Zecherieh]

Thought it might be SVG - wasn't, and I uninstalled quicktime, and everything else I could think that it might be - other than Imagemagik - which I dont want to uninstall - but might need to at least find out if its the problem.

Just had this happen to me again - and its starting to make sense why I never catch it when it happens

I can go many hours straight of working, without ever looking at an explorer view directory - I use the command line for a lot of purposes.

Now, I suddenly had this happen again to me. I still had ImageMagick installed from the time before, and since its all command line - you really do not need to install it anyway. Was talking to a friend about it, downloaded it - ran the installer - and then a day or two later noticed that the damn icons where not thumbnails again.

Mainly noticed cause i opened up a folder with 12,000+ gifs (all converted favicons - so small) - and bam - locked up that window good as it started building thumbnails for em all.

It could be some oddball coincidence - I do not know - but what was in common both times was a recent installation of ImageMagick.

Also found that if I removed

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\jpegfile\shellex
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\giffile\shellex

both of those reg keys - it stoped the thumbnail creation. (right now I am actually getting no icon for either, but I am going to guess that clears up next time I restart explorer - either way - the ugly nothing icon is much better than being locked up)

Really annoying - if you go into thumbnail mode in Explorer - you actually are not in the normal explorer environment anymore - Microsoft created the thumbnail mode seperately, and in a way it can handle tens of thousands of images, without locking up (might take a awhile for the thumbnails to all be created) - normal explorer listview is not built to handle that.

Just thought I would share, in case anyone ever has the same problem.