*solved* Windows Explorer Hogging Cpu

[Tomboy]

Edit:

All,

OK, the mystery has been solved. PcDad was correct in his thinking about windows explorer scanning inside of zip archive files when you click on a directory. Between Friday and Saturday I was downloading several zip archives that contained an unusually large number of files (one had ~90,000 files, and the other ~30,000 files). Wherever these files are placed, they cause the slowdown when you click on that directory. Apparently, when you open a directory by moving between directories using the arrow keys windows explorer does NOT automatically scan the contents of all the zip archive files. Thanks for all the great ideas. It is a relief that nothing was actually wrong with the HD or system.

Tomboy

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Hi,

I need some ideas on what might have happened to my main system (WXP Pro) this past weekend. Sometime between Friday and Saturday, windows explorer started to use 99%+ CPU resources when I clicked on certain subdirectories containing several large files (100 MB+/each). It also takes ~5 minutes for the directory listing to finally come up. Suspecting a virus or trojan, I restored my system from a known good backup. However, this did not change the behavior of the system. I have also noticed that other programs (like ECDC 5.3) also experience this slowdown and high CPU usage when dragging and dropping files from the same directories. Interestingly, once the directory finally displays things seem to work at normal speed again. Scanning both windows (norton windoctor) and the drive (norton disk doctor and chkdsk) for errors fails to find any problems. None-the-less, I am suspecting impending hard drive failure and have purchased a replacement drive today just in case (OfficeMax, WD 40 GB 7200 rpm, $19.95 after rebate :-).

One other strange thing is that I can click on the root directory of the drive and use the arrow keys to move down to the same subdirectory that causes problems when I click on it. In this case, the directory listing comes up immediately as normal. I am really stumped on this one. Has anyone seen this kind of behavior before?

Tomboy