I love Directory Opus but there is one thing that makes me nuts. If I click on a network share for a computer that is off-line, Dopus locks for a very long time (over 20 seconds). The shares are Favorites or buttons which I have added. Is there any way that I could fix this? Windows explorer does not lock up while trying to connect to an unavailable computer. I am running 11.5 x64 on Windows 8.1.
Explorer will lock up sometimes as well, although not always for the same actions.
The issue is that Windows takes a long time to decide the share isn't available, often for operations that would normally be instant, and it's difficult to find and avoid every situation where those actions may block the lister's thread. Windows also provides literally no way to cancel a lot of those operations, so the most you can do is run them on a background thread and abandon the thread if the need for the request has gone away.
Opening a new window is sometimes the quickest way to get going again.
I also experience this problem, I use dopus on my notebook which is not always connected to all the networks where different favorites link to. Isn't it possible to tell dopus to handle network shares indendently? I mean, clicking on a network share/unc path and dopus automatically launches a background thread for this?
It's difficult to completely avoid blocking on an API somewhere, and the APIs take 30 seconds to timeout sometimes. We've made improvements over the years but there are still some case that will block (as there are with Explorer and most other things; it's partly the nature of Windows).
Turning off Preferences / Folders / Auto-Loading / Network drives can help if the problem is opening new windows which remember network folders that no longer exist.
Aside from that, the only thing that might access a network folder without you explicitly navigating to it is generally the folder tree. Turning that off may help in some situations.