I have been having a frustration for the last couple of weeks. Randomly when I select a new location (folder) in Directory Opus, instead of navigating to that folder, Opus freezes up with "Not Responding." The only solution is to go into the Task Manager and manually end the task and then reopen Opus.
The Zipped DMP file while the not responding is happening is too large to upload here.
Dropbox link sent.
Please advise.
Which Dropbox shell extension? There appear to be several.
Please disable all of them to be sure, reboot, and see if it has an effect.
I've disabled them. It will take some time to see if that helps, because the freezing does not happen every time I use DOpus, just intermittently - but enough to be annoying.
I can now confirm that the freezing is still happening with the Dropbox shell extensions disabled. Any other thoughts on what could be causing the problem?
Now this is happening constantly. It is making DOpus basically unusable.
It's just guessing, but maybe something is wrong with folders in FileTypes? Something that freeze Opus when you hold your pointer over directory? Is this happens when you're using only keyboard without mouse?
No it typically happens when I use the mouse to change folder directories. That is, when I try to click on the favorites, or to open a subfolder.
Well, I don't know about favorites, because it's just menu in Opus, so it's probably not related to filetypes. But, just to be sure, open FileTypes from Opus menu (Settings > File Types), double click on "All Folders" in "Directory Opus File Types" section and check "Never show an InfoTip for this File Type" box in "Info Tip" section. Do the same for "All files and folders" just to be sure. This is probably not a solution, I'm probably wrong, but its worth to check anyway.
This does not resolve the problem.
I recommend disabling all other non-Windows shell extensions using ShellExView then rebooting, to see if that helps. From the look of the dump, the problem was being caused by a 3rd party DLL but it wasn't clear which one, although Dropbox looked most likely as it had an active thread.
Shift-click in ShellExView lets you select multiple extensions at once to disable many at the same time. Sorting by the Product Name column is a quick way to group the Windows and non-Windows extensions. (Windows ones will have "Microsoft Windows Operating System" there.)
If you have any script add-ins installed in Opus, disabling those is also worth a try, since they can run when you change folders, but the crash dump didn't indicate any scripts were running so it's probably not them. (Still, worth a try in case something a script did left things in a state which would later freeze after the script finished running.)
Antivirus, firewall and similar software is another possibility for something that might be causing freezes if they've decided the process can't be trusted or allowed to access the files/folders you're browsing. They'd usually show something in their logs if they were involved.
Is there a way to get some help for this problem? It is persisting and getting worse. Can I send another crash dump? It is almost making DOpus unusable. I'm not really sure how to disable every third party extension, or how to narrow down which could be causing the problem.
Did you try the suggestions Leo wrote in his last post? (The one right above your last one.)
When you run ShellExView, it shows a list of all the extensions. You can sort them by the Product Name column if you want to leave the Windows ones alone.
(Although, recently, the Windows File History extension has caused some problems, so I would not always rule them out entirely. They are just the ones I would be the least suspicious of, unless the others had already been ruled out.)
If you right-click an extension in the list, you can disable it. You can also select an extension, then hold shift and click another to select all of the extensions in-between, then right-click and disable lots of them at once.
Disable some or all of the extensions, then reboot and see if the problem is then solved. If it is solved, one of the extensions you just disabled was the cause. Turn a few back on, and see if it comes back. Repeat until you've narrowed it down to a particular extension.
On the other hand, if the problem is still there when all of the extensions are disabled, then we know we are looking in the wrong place, and can think about other things to look at. Antivirus is another thing which can cause extreme slowdowns in some situations (e.g. folders with lots of large installer .exe or .zip files can cause major problems for some antivirus tools).
If you are using a Windows insider build then that is another factor, as they have had some issues lately as well. (If you don't know what a Windows insider build is then you can ignore this as you have to opt into them explicitly and you'd know if you had.)
It's not a Windows Insider Build. Is there a certain type in Shell ExView? When I open Shell ExView, I get 333 items. That seems virtually impossible to troubleshoot.
All 333 are now disabled.
Is the problem still there? If it is, re-enable them all; the problem wasn't caused by any of them and we can stop thinking about ShellExView and extensions entirely.
If the problem is gone:
If the problem is back, you know one of the ones you just re-enabled was the cause. Disable half of them and repeat until you've narrowed it down.
If the problem isn't back, you know all the ones you just re-enabled are OK. Re-enable half of the remaining disabled ones, and repeat.
At each step, you only have to consider half as many things as before, and it soon whittles down to just a handful of potential extensions. At that point it often becomes obvious which on it is (e.g. a PDF-related component, when the problem happens in a folder full of PDF files).
An alternative is to start uninstalling things, but that's a lot more work to undo afterwards. Using ShellExView makes it easy to toggle things on and off without affecting anything else.
Disabling and enabling did not work. I did a complete uninstall and reinstall. That seems to have worked, except that just now I had a crash. I have the dmp file for the crash - I wonder if someone can tell me if this crash was related or was caused by something else. I don't have the ability to read the dmp file.
Thanks.
dopus.20170218.121103.zip (37.1 KB)
If it happens more than once, try turning off Preferences / Display / Transition Animations / Enable transition animations, and please send any other crash dumps that are generated.
The code the dump points to looks unlikely to be the cause of the crash itself, so it may be a symptom of something else corrupting memory within the process. (That could be Opus itself doing it, or a shell extension or similar 3rd party DLL that's loaded into the process.)
I've also made a couple of changes to the code the dump points to, adding some extra checks to it, in case the dump is pointing to the right place.
Turning off transition animations will prevent that code from being used entirely, in the mean time, but you may find it just moves the crash to another place, if it is what I suspect it is.
Just so I am clear, you want me to continue to check for crashes while using my current version (12.3.6 beta) and upload any future crashes to help you figure this out? And if the problem becomes too pervasive, a potential workaround is to disable transitions?