Monday, June 8, 2009

Vista: cannot delete, move, rename and copy files

Update: 20090715

After installing the recently released web update 1 for the Revit Architecture 2010, this problem went away. Thanks Autodesk for solving the problem and letting me know!

Original post below:

Sometimes vista keeps calculating the time remaining to delete or move or rename or copy a file. This happens even if the file is very small. (This problem was prevalent with Autodesk files – RFA, RVT and DWG… and most of the time, these files were atleast 3 or more years old!) Vista just keeps calculating and nothing ever happens. We could not even get the property dialog box to show for these afflicted files. The never ending dialog box looks loke:

2

Pressing cancel does not do anything apart from graying out the cancel button.

1

Clicking on the red “close” button closes the window, but the operation does not succeed.

If we access the same file in Windows XP through the network, XP does not have any problem changing the file.

There has been lots of posts on the web that this was a Vista indexing problem; antivirus problem; Windows defender problem, etc. We tried stopping all those processes to no avail.

Then our IT guru unchecked this option to show thumbnails (in the Folder Options dialog box in the Windows Explorer – Tools menu > Folder options) and restarted the machine.

image

The problem went away!

It looks like Vista is trying to show the thumbnails of certain files, but the DLLs associated with these filetypes cannot find the thumbnails because of the old nature of the files…. and so the DLLS make Vista go on a loop. (just a guess)

However this is not an acceptable solution and you would want to see thumbnails of pics and other files.  :(