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Marquisha · Guest

Planning to reinstall my Windows, but wanted to see if anyone had an
explanation for a strange problem that has developed recently. Just
for my knowledge for future issues, and to tinker with before doing
the reinstall.

Been running a Windows ME install on my work computer for four years
now with no problems. (Don't laugh--with a bit of tweaking, it can be
as solid as Windows 2000.) It has finally started getting
cantankerous, and I'm pretty certain a particularly nasty codec I
installed started the problems. No viruses--Norton has my back 24/7.

Have started having a problem accessing the Desktop from within
programs. My Photoshop 7 in particular locks up whenever I try to
access the Desktop from the Open or Save dialogs (including Save
Optimized and others). Other programs do similar things, either
locking up completely or taking near forever to actually display the
contents of the Desktop. PS7 originally just took a while to show the
Desktop, but in the past few weeks has become unable to access it at
all.

I've run Scandisk and defragged, with no problems or errors. One
other problem I've noticed that might be a clue to the problem is that
WinAmp has developed a hesitation when opening files. It will slow
down the system for five or six seconds, to the point of everything
except the mouse halting. But then the song starts, and it's like
nothing was ever wrong. The location of the files has no bearing on
that behavior, it does the same whether on the master drive or the two
slaves. And I've checked the files and tested with new ones generated
from MusicMatch Jukebox locally, with the same problems.

I've tried moving the swap file to another drive, deleting it and
letting it be recreated, setting a fixed size, and even disabling it
altogether. No change. Didn't install anything new prior to the
problem showing up. It's almost as if the system is tripping over
something, and I've noticed that my startup sound occasionally
"skips", assumedly for the same reason.

I know a reinstall will likely solve the problem, but I'm curious
about what caused it in the first place. Would like to know in case a
similar problem arises in the future.

One thing to ask about: what are the file system limitations for a
system folder like the Desktop? I've got a lot of stuff on the
Desktop, such as the watched folders for Acrobat, a "junk drawer"
folder where I drop things until I can file them properly on a slave
drive, work files that need to be close, etcetera. No program
installations or anything like that, but I do have a lot of
subdirectories involved. I remember having problems on older
Macintosh systems with large hierarchies of subdirectories, but have
never heard of any similar problem with Windows. The paths are
certainly longer than 64 characters (I think that's what the DOS
limitation is), but I'm having problems in programs that shouldn't be
making any file system calls using 8.3 naming.

And one other question. A friend was talking about deleting a "cache
file" to restore the proper operation of things, and I suspect he was
mistakenly referring to deleting shelliconcache.dll to force a rebuild
of the icons. Never heard of anything but boot records and FAT tables
handling file locations--could he be talking about something I'm not
familiar with?

Anybody got a suggestion to try while I've still got a buggy
environment to test with? Thanks for any input. I hate not knowing
what's behind this odd behavior, and the curiosity is killing me!

Marquisha

Phil Barila · Guest

"Marquisha" <mstansford@netscape.net> wrote in message
news:51429f45.0410082056.3d599cdc@posting.google.com...

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