Right-click menü not working on some network files

bsh · Post by *bsh » 2012-07-11, 15:54 UTC

Hello,
I have a samba server share attached to drive letters on a Vista x64 client, and in some cases, when I go into subfolders with many files and select them all and right click for the context menü to zip the files, the "hourglass" appears and TC doesn't respond. Then after a while it either switches the focus to the next window and gets back to normal working state (can be switched back to its window and it works), but the right click menu does not appear. I tried to close all other windows so it can not switch focus (i think actually window manager is responsible for the switching), i can see the upper and left outline of the context menu to flash in then it disappears and TC becomes responsible.
So my guess is, one of the context menu items crashes.
When i copy all the files to a local dirve, it works fine.
When I right click on the folder itself and zip it that way, it works too.
It only happens rarely and I could not find out what causes it. Don't see any special characters in file names or such, no inaccessible files or anything I can think of. Some folder "crashes" TC, some other folders with the same file types may work.

edit: Forgot one more thing: I tried to find out if a specific file may cause this, by selecting only half of the files and doing a right click. It took a few seconds but then it worked. Then I selected the other half of the files, and same thing - took some time but worked. (I think this is called "binary tree search"?) So probably it is just some windows timeout due to slow(?) network?

Post by *ghisler(Author) » 2012-07-12, 12:56 UTC

It's probably happening because one of the context menu extensions is reading from all the files, which can take a long time with network drives. I don't think that there is a workaround.

bsh · Post by *bsh » 2012-07-12, 13:03 UTC

Thank you. I'm trying to find what causes this, and came to the same conclusion.

Post by *ghisler(Author) » 2012-07-12, 13:05 UTC

You can try to temporarily disable third party shell extensions with the tool ShellExView, just make a search for it here in the forum.