I've recently been involved in a fairly hefty project to categorize and
sort photos, including finding and eliminating duplicate pairs and such,
using a Windows XP SP2 system. This system has a reasonably fast CPU,
1GB physical RAM, and an nVidia video card -- it can't play the latest
games like Quake 4, but it's fine for 2d photo work ... or is it?

Here's the problem. After a fairly short time (sometimes as little as
hours) after the last reboot, Explorer and other apps start to feel
sluggish. Explorer searches become slower, and where normally if you
search in a directory once, subsequent searches with new criteria in the
same directory run much faster, it gets to be as slow to do most new
searches as it was to do the first.

Then the previewer starts malfunctioning, often hanging on "Generating
preview..." or spewing "Drawing failed" on perfectly valid JPEGs (which
open fine in Paint or Corel). Initially this manifests when comparing
pairs of images: get them adjacent, double click the first one, hit
right, then left, then right -- the double clock opens the previewer on
the first image, the right-arrow hit loads the second image (but it
takes a bit), the left-arrow returns to the first (also a bit slow), and
the second right-arrow hit makes it flick very quickly back to the
second image. Any differences on this last, fast switch are perceived by
the human eye as movement, so this works pretty well to compare images
.... until it starts hanging on "Generating preview..." on the second
right-arrow hit, that is. Then it progresses to being unable to preview
wider files (esp. 1024 wide or more) at all without "Drawing failed".
Making the previewer window smaller fixes this but only temporarily. The
width it will tolerate also decreases steadily. Eventually, the
previewer becomes useless, having succumbed to some kind of progressive
dementia. Exiting and restarting the previewer does not help (e.g. by
closing the window and then double-clicking a jpeg file).

At this point, thumbnails stop being reliably generated for files in
folder views. They may come up as a jpeg icon, as if the image was
unreadable, or just as a white square, even when the image file is
perfectly readable. Initially, a right click and "refresh thumbnail"
fixes these, but this menu item soon stops working (silently fails).

Other applications begin to exhibit buggy behavior at this point,
invariably video-related. Quake 3 won't launch (says can't initialize
openGL subsystem); glquake says it can't set DIB mode 1024x768x32bpp,
which is interesting since the desktop is at 1024x768x32bpp so it
doesn't need to change mode, and if it does, that mode is obviously
functional. Mozilla Thunderbird goes bonkers, as exhibited at

http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a26...-07_075155.png

where you can see it's become semi-transparent. Toolbar buttons don't
appear unless you roll over them, separators are transparent showing the
windows beneath the Thunderbird window, etc. -- it seems Thunderbird has
screwed up in painting itself on the screen.

And all the while, the Task Manager does not show anything that could
explain this "dementia". There may well be over half the machine's RAM
free, nevermind the total space including swap; the following screenshot
was taken during a severe episode of this bogus behavior:

http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a26...-07_075633.png

The Explorer task has bloated up excessively, but despite this there's
gobs of free memory, nothing's hogging the CPU (Prime95 runs at low
priority), and in general nothing in the task manager display offers a
clue. The system is acting as if it's low on memory or something, but it
isn't.

The only thing that seems to restore the previewer and other things to
normal functioning is a reboot.

What causes this and how can I prevent or fix it, other than constantly
rebooting (sometimes 2, 3x a day)?!

I suspect the previewer is the source of the problem, since it's where
the symptoms first show up, but it seems to create a problem in the
video system generally that then affects everything else eventually. It
may be a combination of a bug in the previewer, or just something
pathological about the way it handles display updates to its window, and
a particular quirk of my video system -- but everything is up to date.

Salient points:
Video -- GeForce2 with all drivers up to date as of less than 2 weeks
ago, and from official sources (i.e. nVidia's web site).
OS -- WinXP SP2, with all critical updates to date.
Mem -- 1GB
CPU -- 1.53GHz Athlon XP 1800+

Drivers, software, antivirus (F-Prot), and antispyware (Ad-Aware and
Spybot) are generally up to date and the latter two have been run since
the last time anything new was installed. I don't think it's spyware or
a virus.

Disabling all non-MS shell extensions does not prevent the problem from
occurring.

I'd like one of the following:
* (Preferable) Some simple patch, registry hack, tweak, or adjustment
that stops this happening, other than "stop using the previewer" since
this project depends on using the previewer to quickly view images, or
* Some way to reset the problem or make it go away once it's started
that doesn't entail a reboot and spending ages waiting for the system
to come back up, and then more ages getting everything (window
positions, open apps, open documents, etc.) back the way I had it.

An explanation as to why this is happening would be nice too, but is
optional. Solutions that have deleterious side effects are not desired.
Solutions that don't involve installing new software or unofficial
patches of some kind are preferred.

--
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Palladium? Trusted Computing? DRM? Microsoft? Sauron.
"One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them
One ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them."

Twisted One wrote:
>snip<
> Here's the problem. After a fairly short time (sometimes
> as little as hours) after the last reboot, Explorer and
> other apps start to feel sluggish. Explorer searches
> become slower, and where normally if you search in a
> directory once, subsequent searches with new criteria in
> the same directory run much faster, it gets to be as slow
> to do most new searches as it was to do the first.
>snip<
====================================
(crossposting removed)

Just a thought....but is it possible that
excessive temp files are the problem?

The following freebie might be useful.
CCleaner
http://www.ccleaner.com/

Running Disk Cleanup, Error Checking and
Defrag on a regular schedule is a good idea.

(310312) Description of the Disk Cleanup
Tool in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=310312

(315265) How to Perform Disk Error Checking
in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=315265
(check the two boxes..."Automatically fix file
system errors" and "Scan for and attempt
recovery of bad sectors") the utility will run
the next time you restart your computer.
(run error checking repeatedly until it finds
no errors)

(314848) How to Defragment Your Disk
Drive Volumes in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=314848

Also... it may help to increase the size of
your paging file:

(308417) HOW TO: Set Performance Options
in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=308417

--

John Inzer
MS Picture It! MVP
How to ask a newsgroup question:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375

John Inzer wrote:
> Just a thought....but is it possible that excessive temp files are the
> problem?

I doubt it.

> The following freebie might be useful.
> CCleaner
> http://www.ccleaner.com/

I run this regularly as a matter of fact.

> Also... it may help to increase the size of
> your paging file:
>
> (308417) HOW TO: Set Performance Options
> in Windows XP
> http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=308417

Oh come on. 1600MB ought to be enough for anybody.

--
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Palladium? Trusted Computing? DRM? Microsoft? Sauron.
"One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them
One ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them."

Twisted One wrote:
> Oh come on. 1600MB ought to be enough for anybody.
========================
Sounds like you have all the answers.

Excuse me for trying to help you.

--

John Inzer
MS Picture It! MVP
How to ask a newsgroup question:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375

John Inzer wrote:
> Twisted One wrote:
>
>> Oh come on. 1600MB ought to be enough for anybody.
>
> ========================
> Sounds like you have all the answers.

Sorry -- I don't really, but I'm pretty sure it isn't temp files. I ran
ccleaner right after it started happening again and it only found about
2 megs of crap, mostly in a web browser's cache. I don't see how the web
browser's cache could be the problem.

I think the previewer is leaking something -- window handles, maybe?

--
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Palladium? Trusted Computing? DRM? Microsoft? Sauron.
"One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them
One ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them."

I've seen this too. Explorer leaks memory and GDI objects. It will
bloat from 40 megs 1700 GDI objects to 400 megs 2700 GDI objects over a
session, with the same set of open windows at the start and end, and
then everything on the computer that depends on graphics (which means
just about everything) will start acting weird or just plain stop
working, until a reboot.

I, too, would be interested to know if there's a registry hack or other
fix to stop it leaking handles and memory, or to undo the leak short of
a reboot. (You can kill the Explorer process and start a new one, but
then you have to painstakingly recreate all of the windows you had
open, whereas if you reboot, the Explorer windows come back as you'd
left them -- but you have to painstakingly recreate all of the
non-Explorer windows you had open! I consider these about equally bad
and want a better option.)