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.  :(

9 comments:

J said...

I have the same issue yet the Folder Option you say was a solution DOES NOT remedy this. Our systems have had that as a default and the issue still happens...perhaps that is but one part of a solution... We'll keep looking though as this is a really bad thing!!! Thanks anyways.
-J

Nicholas Iyadurai said...

J,
Did you "uncheck" that option? The image in my blog shows it as "checked!". For us, unchecking this option worked. The other things we tried were: stopping the indexing service and Windows Defender in the Task Manager.

Lee Boudreau said...

Wanted to point out that this did not fix this issue for me. If you are experiencing this issue look into the searchindexer service. When I deleted a file the window would come up, i would cancel, it would sit there. When I looked at the processes running CPU was using 100%. Turns out that Searchindexer.exe was using up about 90% of CPU. I killed the task and the delete windows closed at the same time. So if you're having this issue try disabling the service, it might fix it... As Nicholas said in his comment.

Lee Boudreau said...

Just wanted to confirm that disabling windows search service has resolved this issue for me without changing anything else.

Dhanjeet Sah said...

Disabling Searchindexer service might affect the windows workflow for other task. You could just exclude *.RVT, *.RFA or other file format to remove from Index search option going thru Contol Panel > Indexing OPtions >Advanced > File Types.

Guraba said...

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* Path too long
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* The source or destination file may be in use.
* The file is in use by another program or user.
* Error Deleting File or Folder
* Make sure the disk is not full or write-protected and that the file is not currently in use.
* Error Copying File or Folder.
* Cannot remove folder.
* The filename or extension is too long.
* Path too deep.
* Destination Path Too Long.
* Could not find this item.
* Filename is not valid.
* The file could not be accessed.
* The path you entered, is too long. Enter a shorter path.
* File Name could not be found. Check the spelling of the filename, and verify that the file location is correct.


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