For a file manager, Windows Explorer (for later puropses, WE)is extremely unstable. Why? First, even MS cannot figure out what you are referring to when you say 'Windows Explorer'. They tend to think you mean the browser. I think they are trying to fix the terminalogy in 8, but dear effing gawd, why did it take so long? Ever since Vista, as best I can tell, WE has been insanely unstable for a file manager. Right click on anything in the navigation pane and WE will (almost) invariably crash, sometimes taking down mere instances, sometimes all. This happened in Vista. This wasn't fixed in 7. This is STILL effing up even tho I've gone to 7-64bit. Anyone have a clue?
beep 4 Light Poster
Hiroshe 499 Posting Whiz in Training
First off, I'm not usually a fan of that kind of file manager anyways. I do use it, often because it's good enough for small operations and I would need to go out of my way to not use it, but I generally prefer either an orthodox file manager, or the command line. Thats for the reason of regexs as well as performing operations on the files.
However I would not expect everyone to learn how to use the command line or an othodox file manager. So back on topic.
The cultural answer to "why":
I find in Windows, you need to put work into keeping your system clean, otherwise it will start doing a lot of things "on it's own". I don't think Microsoft is nessacarily to blame for that. It's more to do with the fact that when you're programming open source software, you need to respect the persons computer (otherwise someone will fix it for you), and that's become part of the culture. When your programming closed source software, often it's "features" that are required for commercial success, and respecting the users computer is a little less important. This is how the corprate culture is sometimes.
My solution to combat that is to have harsh resctrictions on whats allowed to be done on your computer. After installing a program, I'll check for changes in the registry, check to see if anything new is starting up as an application or a service, I'll check to see what file it's created, I'll look at any explorer extentions and I'll enfore my normal HIPS policies.
The technical answer to "why":
I feel like in your case it's most likely due to Explorer Extentions. Take a look at http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shexview.html as well as http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shell_menu_view.html and disable anything you don't need. This also makes it less annoying to go through your context menu.
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