I've had so many problems with explorer. First a problem i mentioned earlier in this forum: I was/am unable to delete movies (.avi) and i coudn't figure out why. First i thought i was my antivirus program, that caused the error: The file is used by another program. But after uninstalling the antivirus program the error persisted. Then i turned on the "launch folder windows in a seperate process" which stopped the lagging after trying to delete movies. But it didn't stop the error. What i found out is that explorer - by default - looks for content in the folders you open, and when it's movies it starts running the movie in the background. Try it for yourself: open a folder with 2-3 or more movies in it, and then start taskmanager and se how much memory explorer starts taking up. After a restart explorer.exe is normally using about 5-8 MB after opening a folder with movies it rises to 40-50 MB. The same thing happens when you open a folder with mp3's. It adds columns about artist, bitrate, album and so on, and explorer also rises a bit, but not as much as with the movies (perhaps due to the size of the movies) Is that a feature you can turn on/off? Why does explorer add columns that matched the content of folders - it does this with both programs, movies, music and documents (?) I've tried to click propertiesd on my movie-folder and set the content to be documents (which is default) but i tells me to enable Folder tasks (what is that?) I'm using the classic desktop and the classic folders view and that makes me wonder why it does this "auto-look in folders to what content it has?"

And how did you come upon this revelation that explorer runs movies in the background? Explorer is no more capable of playing movies than notepad is. I've got explorer open to a folder with 118 movies (AVI & MPG) in detail view as I write this - it's using a little over 11MB of memory, and my cpu usage varies from 0% to 3%, with explorer using 1% max. If I open explorer in a folder with 33 JPGs in thumbnail view memory usage goes up to 12.5MB. CPU usage doesn't change. Nor do I have any problems deleting movies - although I've noticed that after playing one, I sometimes get a 'file in use' error if I try to delete it immediately - seems like media player doesn't unlock it right away. If I wait a few seconds, I can delete it no problem. The fields that appear in detail view are completely under your control. Windows uses default settings depending on the content type, but you can change this by right-clicking on the header and selecting the fields you want. Obviously, if you have it set to show detials like bitrate, dimensions, etc., explorer has to open each file to get this info, which can slow things down a bit, but shouldn't cause problems otherwise. 'Folder tasks' is what appears on the left pane of explorer giving you a list of things you can do with the files in that folder - play them preview them, whatever. When you select the content type for the folder, it tells explorer what options to put in this pane. This is a feature for newbies who can't grasp concepts like drag & drop, context menus, or double-clicking... I think your problem lies elsewhere...

any ideas.... about what can cause it? Even if i don't play a movie i have trouble deleting it? Even right after a restart!

A couple of questions. Does this problem occur ONLY with avi files or other types as well? And does it happen for all of them, regardless of which folder the files are in? If the files are being kept open by some process, try downloading this utility: http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/procexp.shtml It will give you detailed information about each process running on your system, including which files it has open. Once you have this info, we can figure out how to prevent this from happening...

Thanks - i'll try that! It only happens with movies. I think - not sure though - that it's worst if i haven't installed the codec to play the movie. Enemy at the gates for an instance, if i opened the folder with this movie, it made my entire computer lag, and it took ages for explorer to show the dimensions and the bitrate of the movie. i couldn't even turn these columns off for at least 20-30 seconds. And then afterwards i couldn't move or delete the file. I found out about this when i was gouind throught the different folders of movies and was figuring out what movies used which codecs (i wanted to sort them by codec)

I have the same problem, but only with partially downloaded avi's, i have to wait any seconds proportionally to the size of the file if i want to delete or rename it.

I also have this problem with partially downloaded .avi:s Even when I dont have either thumbnails or detailed view enabled, windows tries to obtain these data. With complete .avs:s that is no problem. But with big partially downloaded .avi:s the process of going thru the entire file to find that it is not working takes forever and an huge amount of RAM. (windows does that also when you try to open partially downloaded .avi:s) Anyone have an idea about how to turn thumbnails of completly? Is it possible the use the explorer from NT4? Or are ther any third party fileexplorers that works good? The old Microsoft joke "It's not a bug it's a feature" allways come in handy.