Classic Shell: Forum

I own a computer repair business and recently had a customer come to me with a laptop running Windows 8.1, with Classic Shell installed on it.

When he delivered the laptop to me, his desktop was frozen....his taskbar was inoperable, it was all locked up. Only thing I could click was the start menu, and that only resulted in the start menu trying to open, but only displaying an opaque display box.

I would click on icons, and programs would either not open at all or lag severely.

Seeing as he had a lot of free spyware cleaning software ( most of which are junk programs, that do little good ), I decided that his laptop was likely bogged down with spyware and in need of a good cleaning, so I reformatted his drive.

And downloaded Classic Shell again and it froze once more. It has now been removed and his computer is fine.

Took me a lot of diagnostic testing and brainstorming to conclude it was classic shell as I had never heard of classic shell before, and found it while doing research on why this elderly customers start screen was looking similar to older OS's. So hence, why I then re-downloaded it to put his start menu back the way he wanted it.

So when it froze the second time, I did not immediately think of classic shell being the problem, but rather a hardware issue. Yet no hardware problem was detected.

So thats what brought me to suspect classic shell, as its a third party software and my suspicion was correct.

But now I'm reading that classic shell is fairly popular, so I would like to know if there was any settings I should have tweaked? I Downloaded the most current version from the main screen of this site, simply started using the computer and about 10min later, his task bar was locked up again.

I did record any log files, I just removed it and told him that it didn't play well with Microsoft systems apparently and should not be used. I'm hesitant to download again without some background info on what I should have done before this, as I do like the concept of it.

You can capture a crash dump using the instructions here: viewtopic.php?f=12&t=6

I did not capture a crash dump and removed classic shell and do not wish to download again unless there
something specific I should be looking to adjust ahead of time, as I see a lot of posts on other sites stating the same problem I came across. So that leads me to thinking there's a common cause as to why a lot of users report frozen start menus.

There are multiple reasons that can cause this. Usually it means some Windows system is either not responding or slow to respond. For example maybe the start menu is trying to access a network resource that is no longer available. Without a crash dump it is impossible to diagnose.