I'm evaluating Directory Opus and everything went fine, until today suddenly it hangs when I want to open one particular folder. I can access all other folders, and even the subfolders of the one (I can open them up in the tree pane), but when I click this one folder the lister hangs (Windows shows "not responding"). I can open new listers without problems.
Is it possible that DO keeps a cache which has become corrupted for that folder? If so, is there a way to clear the cache? I welcome any solution except reinstalling; I'm not going to uninstall and reinstall every time if it happens again.
If this can't be solved I'm not going to purchase Directory Opus.
The problem is usually caused by a 3rd party shell extension or, more rarely, by a particular file which triggers a bug somewhere in Opus that nobody has found/reported before.
Could be a folder that contains LNK shortcuts to network shares. I have experienced hangs with this. Windows seems to like to access the target of shortcuts before displaying them and seems to have a hang timeout there.
The problem appears to be in Windows Explorer, or even deeper in the file system. See this problem report.
Windows Explorer locks every .msg file, and relocks immediately after the locking handle is released (I use Unlocker for that). I suspect this is caused by a bug in the latest Windows update, since another user reported the same problem around the same time. See the link above.
But IMO Directory Opus doesn't go scot-free. DO can't access the file's properties, but shouldn't hang on that. After a timeout it should move to the next file, so that the file information for the other files is shown, and just the .msg files missing.
I think there is some confusion here. If Opus can't access a file's properties then it should not lock up, and the operation should fail immediately, at the OS level, so no timeout is neccesary.
Also, once you use Unlocker, all bets are off. Unlocker manipulates programs in an unsafe way.
Opus does not care about .msg files specifically, but shell extensions you have as part of Windows or other software will, and they will run inside of Opus unless disabled. The same for antivirus scanners.
You can use process monitor to see which operations dopus.exe performs before the hang, and the stack window within process monitor to see which exe or dll the code calling those operations belongs to. I strongly suspect the code will not be Opus itself (although if it is, the proc mon info could help us locate the problem).
[quote="leo"]I think there is some confusion here. If Opus can't access a file's properties then it should not lock up, and the operation should fail immediately, at the OS level, so no timeout is neccesary.
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It's been a while, but I'm returning because it happened again to me a couple of times; lots of folders seem to have .msg files in them (often unins000.msg, which I suppose were placed there by the OS). You say the operation should fail immediately, but apparently that's not what happens. Opus hangs, and has to be cancelled in the Task Manager. I want to repeat my suggestion of putting a timeout on reading file properties. The current situation is extremely frustrating.