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Microsoft released an update for Windows 7 today (Tuesday, April 27, 2010): KB980408:

The April 2010 stability and reliability update for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 is available.

The update fixes, among other things:

Windows Explorer may stop responding for 30 seconds when a file or a directory is created or renamed after certain applications are installed.

i'm not experiencing it on my own Windows 7 machine, but two colleagues at work were experiencing the problem. i would really like to know what applications were causing problems.

Microsoft will never call out the misbehaving applications. i want to know what software i should be ridiculing and insulting. And avoid in the future.

Did anyone who was experiencing this problem isolate the applications?

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It may not be the fault of the applications, at least not fully. If the fix is to OS DLL's, it may be that the issue was, at least partially, in the OS. It is likely caused by a combination of factors and is exposed by how some apps do specific things. – ongle Apr 28 '10 at 0:18
i know it could be the fault of Explorer. But Windows ships with an application compatibility list containing over 1,300 applications. i'm confident that a 3rd party product is doing something wrong, and Microsoft is shipping a fix to work around someone else's bug. Adobe products themselves get 25 appcompat fixes. – Ian Boyd Apr 28 '10 at 13:02
Click Start and type in Reliability History look when the crash happened and right click it and View Technical Details that information might help – Sandeep Bansal Sep 22 '11 at 14:31
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I had these symptoms and it seemed to be Microsoft Security Essentials causing it. It will be interesting to see if it was the same problem.

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Neither of them were running Security Essentials. – Ian Boyd Jun 6 '10 at 14:20
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After configuring Symbols you can use Process Explorer to check the stack of the hung thread to see which file is causing this delay; do 1, 2, 10, 16, 17, 18 of http://www.solsem.com/lab-setup.html first.

Then, when the hang occurs you can double click on Explorer.exe, go to the Threads view and check the Stack of the threads to see which file or application could be causing this, if you have problems doing that you can try this forum: http://forum.sysinternals.com/troubleshooting_forum6.html

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As i said, i wasn't experiencing the issue. If i was, i would have debugged it. And since the update my colleagues are no longer experiencing it. Like i said in the question: i'm only looking to assign blame, and to be condescending and insulting towards a company and its products. – Ian Boyd Jul 20 '10 at 17:17
You can't do nothing more than going to the list of shell extensions Explorer uses, or the DLL injections that are occuring at Explorer.exe. You didn't say that the update was being istalled so I thought that you still had the ability to troubleshoot this issue... Which you actually still have, you could remove the update and wait for the problem to occur again an then debug it with the method described above. But well, it's patched now and up-to-date computers won't see this problem anymore. It might have been a bug in Explorer.exe that acts weird or times out when some parameters are given. – Tom Wijsman Jul 20 '10 at 17:54
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the update patch for KB980408 for Windows 7 x64 made it impossible for me to log into my computer after displaying a "Setting up personalized settings for Windows Desktop Update" message, after killing that task a "Windows Explorer is not responding - Windows is checking for a solution to the problem" message appears, then it waits forever... If I kill that task, I am not able to continue the boot process, if I run explore.exe manually, the same thing happens. Updates should NOT ruin a computer

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-1 Rant, about an unrelated issue, should, at the very least, be a comment. – Ian Boyd Apr 30 '10 at 15:31
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