[ChronoReverse]

First thing I did was a chkdsk

I've disabled caching of thumbnails and I'm also in detai view


@kazan

That's what I used.  Some zealots claimed I was a fool to do so and should've used reiserFS.  Which is why I asked.

[Flipside]

How many files are in the directory to read? And have you turned off that search speeder-upper thing?

[Kazan]

i see no advantages to reiserFS

some nerd's need to have a "Holier than thou" complex

[ChronoReverse]

I've turned off indexing if that's what you mean.

The drive is a NTFS drive.

There are 203 files in the folder for a total of ~65mb.

[Flipside]

Yup, that's what I meant Chrono.

Hmmmmmmm... I think I might agree with Bobb here, Explorer is a complete memory hog in my experience, and occasionally it will fill up memory and crash 'because it feels like it'
I actually disable Explorer from the Task Manager when I am doing things like rendering etc, it speeds things up quite a lot

I'm, quite frankly stumped, I've no idea whatsoever why it only does it in this one directory

[ChronoReverse]

Hmm, even weirder is that when I look in the same folder using Photoshop, the same thing occurs.  Except the memory doesn't get cleared until I quit Photoshop instead of ending explorer.

[Flipside]

The last time I had anything even approaching that problem, it was a virus in the directory I was opening, but since you only have image files in there, I don't see how this can be the case.

The only other, somewhat far-fetched option I can think of, is that your drive needs a defrag, and that the contents of your effects folder is spread out all over the hard drive. That way, I guess it is possible, since NTFS uses tiny data 'blocks' to store data, that all that memory is being taken up by reference data. Nonetheless, it's bloody wierd that it should only happen to that one directory

[phreak]

if i was home, i could write a program that moves files from directories one at a time so you can see which file was doing that.  and once you found it, delete it in dos.  i had this happen once with XP interpreting a Freespace ANI file as a windows cursor (and it tried to generate a preview).  it started hogging up about 150MB+ of RAM.

[ChronoReverse]

I bet it's the ani thing.  As soon as I get home I'll test it out manually.

BTW I just defragged no less than 2 weeks ago.

[Flipside]

LOL Well, that's another theory shot down

Ah well, 2 weeks is a long time when Windows is managing your Hard Drive

[ChronoReverse]

Windows doesn't manage my harddrive.  I've always used a 3rd party program to do so.  This includes the winxp partial defrag that occurs for boot-time speed up.  I've relegated it to a 3rd party program.

[Arc]

The ANI idea sounds good - .ani and .cur are the extensions for windows mouse cursors. I'm fairly certain that explorer generates the icon for mouse cursor files from the file itself instead of using a single icon for the file type, no matter which view you're in. I assume Photoshop uses the standard windows file open dialog, so that'll do the same thing as explorer.

[Grey Wolf]

Hmmm.... Have you tried any of those alternate Windows file managers floating around? That might help with your problem.

[ChronoReverse]

It won't help when I look in the folder using Photoshop though.



BTW, the final verdict is: .ani files are causing the problem.  After I moved them out of the folder this didn't occur anymore.  Then when I renamed them one by one, by restarting explorer, the memory usage when looking in the folder with .ani's dropped.


So I'll be moving them into a VP I guess.


/me looks for a copy of VP builder