Windows Explorer hangs when opening a specific folder

Question

When I open a particular folder on my inside a folder on my desktop. This folder was copied via a DVD-ROM from a previous computer. I didn't have any problems with this folder on the other computer. There are 36,316 files and 7,558 folders in this directory and it's 3.30GB.

Any ideas why this might be happening?

Answer 1

Did the old computer have better hardware?

It is likely XP indexing the folder and trying to gather information about the subfolders. If there are a lot of images in the parent folder, explorer will typically hang as there are so many thumbnails to generate.

The hiccup would be much more noticeable on older hardware.

Answer 2

Is anything appearing in Task Manager with high CPU usage at all?

Do you have any antivirus software running? If so, depending on the type of files, it may well be trying to scan the behemoth of a folder in the background. This could be resulting in the lockup.

If so, try temporarily disabling it to see if it helps.

Answer 3

I can't believe I didn't notice this. There were shortcuts in the root folder that referenced my old computer. They had absolute paths. They changed from C:\ to \\old-computer\c$. I'm on a enterprise network if that has anything to do with it.

I removed those shortcuts and reinstalled Windows. All is well now.