Suddenly File Explorer Has Become Useless

Whenever I open it, that Green Bar with Working on it... below it,
hangs. What did I do to deserve this? I did install Calibre but it
is closed now and File Explorer still won't work. Is good old Windows
Explorer available on the machine? Or is there some other file
manager available?

On 17/02/2017 18:40, Ricardo Jimenez wrote:
Whenever I open it, that Green Bar with Working on it... below it,
hangs. What did I do to deserve this?
You corrupted your user profile. Try creating a new Windows profile
(some call this User Account) and see if it works.

I did install Calibre but it
is closed now and File Explorer still won't work.
God knows what Calibre is and I am not in a mood to research it. It is
Friday evening here in London, UK.

Is good old Windows
Explorer available on the machine?
No. File Explorer, Windows Explorer, File Manager, whatever, are terms
that are used interchangeably. They mean the same thing to most people.

Or is there some other file
manager available?

God knows. I rarely install any craps on my machine as Windows 10 has
more than anything I am likely to need!!!!.




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With over 500 million devices now running Windows 10, customer
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Ricardo Jimenez wrote:
Whenever I open it, that Green Bar with Working on it... below it,
hangs. What did I do to deserve this? I did install Calibre but it
is closed now and File Explorer still won't work. Is good old Windows
Explorer available on the machine? Or is there some other file
manager available?

Considering the feature set, it would help
if you gave examples of things you did with
Calibre, leading up to the event in question.
Did you load DRM stripping plugins ? Did you get
the plugins from a place you wouldn't normally trust ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calibre_(software)

It manages and converts Ebooks, but it can also
be tied into Dropbox or OneDrive, and perhaps you
managed to tie something into a loop in terms
of directory structure. Now the tool is madly
copying content on top of the one directory.

If you barely opened the program and closed it,
without defining any storage scheme or loading
any Ebooks into it, that would be a different
matter. As then, someone out here could load
it and test.

I've had calibre loaded once here, a couple years
ago, but turfed it pretty well immediately. I don't
have an Ebook collection for one thing. There may have
been some other reason I gave it the boot, but I don't
remember now. I don't recollect it having frozen
something.

Paul

On Fri, 17 Feb 2017 21:28:22 -0500, Paul
wrote:

Ricardo Jimenez wrote:
Whenever I open it, that Green Bar with Working on it... below it,
hangs. What did I do to deserve this? I did install Calibre but it
is closed now and File Explorer still won't work. Is good old Windows
Explorer available on the machine? Or is there some other file
manager available?

Considering the feature set, it would help
if you gave examples of things you did with
Calibre, leading up to the event in question.
Did you load DRM stripping plugins ? Did you get
the plugins from a place you wouldn't normally trust ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calibre_(software)

It manages and converts Ebooks, but it can also
be tied into Dropbox or OneDrive, and perhaps you
managed to tie something into a loop in terms
of directory structure. Now the tool is madly
copying content on top of the one directory.

If you barely opened the program and closed it,
without defining any storage scheme or loading
any Ebooks into it, that would be a different
matter. As then, someone out here could load
it and test.

I've had calibre loaded once here, a couple years
ago, but turfed it pretty well immediately. I don't
have an Ebook collection for one thing. There may have
been some other reason I gave it the boot, but I don't
remember now. I don't recollect it having frozen
something.

Paul

What I did was to move my Calibre directory (that was moved from my
Win 7 machine) from the C drive to my previously empty D drive and I
told Calibre where the directory was now. And I didn't add anything
new to that directory. Could that have done it? TIA.

Ricardo Jimenez wrote:
On Fri, 17 Feb 2017 21:28:22 -0500, Paul
wrote:

Ricardo Jimenez wrote:
Whenever I open it, that Green Bar with Working on it... below it,
hangs. What did I do to deserve this? I did install Calibre but it
is closed now and File Explorer still won't work. Is good old Windows
Explorer available on the machine? Or is there some other file
manager available?
Considering the feature set, it would help
if you gave examples of things you did with
Calibre, leading up to the event in question.
Did you load DRM stripping plugins ? Did you get
the plugins from a place you wouldn't normally trust ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calibre_(software)

It manages and converts Ebooks, but it can also
be tied into Dropbox or OneDrive, and perhaps you
managed to tie something into a loop in terms
of directory structure. Now the tool is madly
copying content on top of the one directory.

If you barely opened the program and closed it,
without defining any storage scheme or loading
any Ebooks into it, that would be a different
matter. As then, someone out here could load
it and test.

I've had calibre loaded once here, a couple years
ago, but turfed it pretty well immediately. I don't
have an Ebook collection for one thing. There may have
been some other reason I gave it the boot, but I don't
remember now. I don't recollect it having frozen
something.

Paul

What I did was to move my Calibre directory (that was moved from my
Win 7 machine) from the C drive to my previously empty D drive and I
told Calibre where the directory was now. And I didn't add anything
new to that directory. Could that have done it? TIA.

The SIDs on each machine are different.

Many times on here, people will give the sage advice to
"use the same account and password" when using Windows
file sharing. This is all good advice, except that it doesn't
point out one tiny detail. The actual SID used on each Windows
install is different (at least on my home LAN with independent
computers it is).

In this example, I list the permissions on one of my data files.
The file was sitting on a foreign machine. I copied it over.
To gain access to the folder, the green bar "added a user"
to the permissions. Even though I'm "Paul" on both machines,
on one machine I'm account 1001, and on the other I'm 1000.
With two owners stamped on there, both accounts can now
access the file. So when you see the green bar in
File Explorer, and a folder from a foreign machine is
involved, a new user can be added to the list of owners
and permissions.

Users\Username\Downloads\002_stitch_r.tif
D:AI
(A;ID;FA;;;SY)
(A;ID;FA;;;BA)
(A;ID;FA;;;S-1-5-21-645345861-2399526194-2368239795-1001)
(A;ID;FA;;;S-1-5-21-3768549767-1934788099-1503758287-1000) --- added by green throbber

Now, if Calibre runs into a permissions problem, it should
just throw something like "error 5" "access denied" or similar.
It shouldn't really freeze.

So I don't immediately see a mechanism where that causes
a green bar to freeze. Something must be deadlocking,
but what ? I would probably open Task Manager, and see if
Calibre is railed at 100% CPU on one core or something. As
a sign it's a little fight Calibre is having with itself.

In the process of bringing the files over from the other
C: , there should have been ample opportunity to added
a user to the set of permissions.

When you do Properties on a file or folder, Windows uses
the symbolic name. So "SY" becomes SYSTEM in the GUI.
One of my numbered accounts might be "Paul". The other
numbered account cannot be converted to a symbolic name,
because only the other computer knows the mapping. If
computers are on a Domain, the Domain controller likely
knows more of the names, and so they should all have
symbolic information.

I think this is a red herring, except if there is some
design issue with Calibre itself. I just cannot imagine
what that would be, because if software finds "Access
Denied", it gets the info immediately. And all it has
to do is "stop what it is doing, and alert the user".
That's the usual response. Only an idiotic program
would bang on the permissions hundreds of times a
second, getting the same Access Denied each time :-)
Anyone can put an infinite loop in their code,
without too much trouble.

*******

If you do find Calibre is very busy in Task Manager,
you can use Sysinternals Process Monitor to see what
things Calibre is trying to do. But I only resort
to tools like this, when I see a behavior I know
I can analyze. If the whole machine is frozen for
example, I don't stand a chance of using this :-)

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/...processmonitor

You don't need to set a filter to use that. It captures
events immediately. In the File menu, if you remove the
tick mark half way down the menu, the program stops capturing
information. And then you can examine the trace at your
leisure. You would start Procmon running, try to use
Calibre, making sure you collected enough trace when
Calibre has the problem, then stop the Procmon trace
and have a look at all the lines generated by Calibre
in the trace. For example, maybe I'd be looking for
lines with "CreateFile" in them, issued by Calibre.
Doing properties on single lines in the trace, you
can find out what response Calibre got when it tried
to do something.

I've actually used Process Monitor, to debug an entire
backup run. I was using backup software, and trying to
figure out what went wrong. The trace in that case
was 9GB long. That's probably the biggest trace
I've ever looked through. And since I knew the problem
was near the end of the trace, I didn't read the whole thing.

When my sound card wouldn't work on WinXP, I use
Process Monitor. I had to look through around
100,000 events, to find a single suspicious registry
entry, which caused "no sound". By fixing that
entry, I got the sound back. But when that happens,
it's pure luck. Many traces are so big, you'll never
trace down the root cause.

I doubt Calibre keeps a log file, but if it refuses
to notify the user when there is a problem, I would
go looking to see if it keeps a log somewhere. It
should *not* store the log in the Program Files folder...
Only older software is dumb enough to try that.

Paul

I simply removed Calibre and now everything works fine. It wouldn't
even let me move pdf files from my PC to my Android tablet. I will do
more research on ebook managers before I install anything again. I
really do need some sort of way to look for stuff by document keyword
because I have so many documents. Anybody have suggestions? Paid
programs are OK.

On Sat, 18 Feb 2017 10:30:23 -0500, Ricardo Jimenez
wrote:

I simply removed Calibre and now everything works fine. It wouldn't
even let me move pdf files from my PC to my Android tablet. I will do
more research on ebook managers before I install anything again. I
really do need some sort of way to look for stuff by document keyword
because I have so many documents. Anybody have suggestions? Paid
programs are OK.
I've beeen using Calibre for over 7 years and never had a problem with
it, on WinXP, WIn7 or Win10. Currently nearly 9000 items in the
library. Originally used it with a Sony ebook reader, now using it
with an Android tablet.

Davidm wrote:
On Sat, 18 Feb 2017 10:30:23 -0500, Ricardo Jimenez
wrote:

I simply removed Calibre and now everything works fine. It wouldn't
even let me move pdf files from my PC to my Android tablet. I will do
more research on ebook managers before I install anything again. I
really do need some sort of way to look for stuff by document keyword
because I have so many documents. Anybody have suggestions? Paid
programs are OK.
I've beeen using Calibre for over 7 years and never had a problem with
it, on WinXP, WIn7 or Win10. Currently nearly 9000 items in the
library. Originally used it with a Sony ebook reader, now using it
with an Android tablet.


Ditto, and use on Ubuntu since 7.04. Most likely cause of OP's issue was
a permissions problem or file corruption when transferring directory. I
have encountered similar situations when rescuing data from a failing
drive.

--
Take care,

Jonathan
-------------------
LITTLE WORKS STUDIO
http://www.LittleWorksStudio.com

Ricardo Jimenez wrote:

I simply removed Calibre and now everything works fine. It wouldn't
even let me move pdf files from my PC to my Android tablet. I will do
more research on ebook managers before I install anything again. I
really do need some sort of way to look for stuff by document keyword
because I have so many documents. Anybody have suggestions? Paid
programs are OK.

Google Desktop has been discontinued by Google but is still available
for download. I am using it under Windows 10.