On the way to Win 7: A Vista Speedbump (Explorer Not Responding)...
As I await my Win 7 upgrade kit I spent many an hour in the last week attempting to resolve a serous issue that many Vista users on a variety of manufacturers systems, have experienced (although it manifests itself in different ways, with different degrees of severity, and evidently has several underlying causes, permanent and temporary fixes ). Along the way I made two clean reinstalls of Vista using HP's recovery disks. After the 2nd fresh install the 1st app I installed was Acronis True Image 2010 for backup and recovery, and I was more careful of what I installed and settings changes I made, and I documented each step more rigorously, backing up frequently as I proceeded to then install Vista SP2, some 30+ Windows 'important' and 'recommended' updates including IE8, then on to Firefox, and then key applications and utilities.
Explorer Is Not Responding
The problem manifested itself when I would use Explorer (or an alternative file manager) to delete, move, or copy, a folder or file. An "Explorer Is Not Responding" error message would display followed by a clickable message to 'Restart Explorer'. Sometimes that would work, sometimes not. Eventually clicking on that would loop Explorer, and
To exacerbate matters attempting to do a system restore (even from Safe Mode) would not succeed. After successfully restarting a message would state that Vista could not restore to the previous restore point. Threads on the subject on numerous message boards suggested a number of causes including trojans or other malware, corrupted files (especially video files) or conflicts with certain applications. Some suggested fixes would work temporarily .I suspected either a program conflict, or a settings change I'd made early on.
Resolving the Issue (Hopefully)
On this last go round I turned on the Try & Decide mode of Acronis TI (that I'd never used in TI 2009 on my XP box) before loading new apps (and particularly a trio of them I suspected as culprits) or making significant changes.
"After starting Try&Decide mode you can safely install any system updates, drivers and applications without worrying about what might happen to your system. If anything goes wrong, you can simply discard the changes made in the Try&Decide mode. One of the best features of Try&Decide is that it isolates your "real" operating system from changes to the temporary operating system duplicate made by updates. Should you find any kind of incompatibility, you can easily revert your system to the initial state, which was not changed when the update was applied"
Worked like a champ and I believe I've figured out the offending program that after use was sending Explorer south.
The Culprit ...
... (it appears -- knock on wood) turned out to be Avanquest's 'Vista Ready' PowerDesk 7. It's a file manager on steroids and I've used it from version 4 (from OnTrack) through v5 & v6 (from VCom) and similar to the original Norton Navigator but much more powerful, and it is the best file manager I've found. It's always one of the 1st apps I load on my own new boxes and I load a freeware version on friends systems that I troubleshoot for them. While there is an install option to replace Explorer with PowerDesk I've never enabled it. There's also an option to force a refresh after moving copying or working with files (and I do turn that on, but evidently it doesn't work with Vista (or at least SP2).
From here on out as I continue to add applications, and optimize Vista in preparation for and ready the system for an inplace 7 upgrade I'm staying in TI's Try&Decide mode, testing Explorer regularly, and making incremental backups and a full one daily on my 2nd drive while retaining a prior full backup that works cleanly.
Teeak VI (similar to the Tweak UI Powertoy for XP but much more powerful) was another suspected culprit but it works fine. I am keeping changes made with it to a minimum because they could potentially be injurious to an upgrade to 7.
- Eric - |
