Classic Shell: Forum

Hello,

Firstly I'd just like to say thank you for such an excellent and customizable bit of software! I'm using it in a school and it's helped a lot of younger children (and staff!) become accustomed to our recent update to Windows 10.

There's one problem though; I'm experiencing reproducible crashing in Explorer (the taskbar hangs, and only restarting "Windows Explorer" fixes it). I can reproduce it by renaming files and copying and pasting backwards and forwards for about 5-6 minutes (very technical test!).

Removing Classic Shell stops the crashing, but I'm sure it must be something else that's making Classic Shell fall over, and then Explorer.

I've tried it on various editions of Windows (Enterprise, Education, LTSB, the 1511 build, and the Feb16 updated version of the 1511 build), and they all do the same thing. I'm removing software on a machine that crashes bit by bit and making it crash each time, but without more to go on it's just guesswork, and rather time consuming!

I've attached a couple of dump files for explorer.exe, one just before I made it crash, and one once it had hung. Hopefully they are of some use.

If there's any other information that would assist, extra dump files etc... Just let me know.

Kind Regards,
Michael.

I don't see any problem related to Classic Shell. I see however a large number of threads related to Media Center.
I would enable the setting that runs the Explorer windows in their own process. This way you can see if the hang is related to the start menu (which runs in the Desktop/Taskbar process) or the actual Explorer window process.

Thank you!

I'm so used to setting that option in explorer on my own machines, I'd for some reason thought I'd already set it via policy for our Domain computers; turns out it wasn't set, and enabling the option to run folder windows in a separate process does indeed resolve the issue (or at least mitigate it to the point where I can't reproduce the hanging anymore). You've made me a very happy man!

Incidentally, you mentioned the only thing you could see in the dump file was a reference to media center; what was the file name that came up? If it's due to a shell extension or service that I can disable I'd like to do that too just to be safe, so any extra information you can provide from that dump file would be very helpful.

Thank you again.

I see "dlnashext.dll" and "PlayToDevice.dll" being mentioned. I can't see the actual media file name being accessed because it is missing from the dump.