Slow Sorting in Explorer / Green Bar Of Doom, plus Possible Solution

A few days ago, I started running into a problem with Explorer. After Windows had been up for a while, viewing a folder would bog down. I'd get the green bar crawling across the top of the window, gradually grinding to a halt.

The cause was hard to nail down. I'd just installed a whole bunch of stuff. Avid Studio, VLC, 7zip, Dropbox, DIVX codec pack, Intel video driver. The culprit could've been any one of them. Or it could've been an update to any of the existing apps on the machine.

I started by using msconfig to disable all startup apps and non-MS services. For a while, I thought that helped but the problem was still there. It seemed to show up after I'd been browsing through folders in Explorer for a while but there didn't seem to be any consistency in when it came up.

This morning, I rebooted, started up task manager and watched the processes while I was navigating through Explorer. At one point, wmprph.exe showed up on the process list. Almost immediately, Explorer bogged down. After a bit of experimenting, I figured out that wmprph.exe was kicked off when I clicked on a large mp4 file I'd been working with in Avid. Turns out wmprph.exe is "Windows Media Player Rich Preview Handler". So, something about the way Explorer was previewing video files was bogging it down.

That narrowed things down a bit. My last try was to uninstall the DIVX codec pack. It looks like that helped. My guess is that wmprph.exe was calling a DIVX codec to preview the mp4 file and the codec was choking on the file. After removing the DIVX pack, the preview came up right away and Explorer kept working.

I think I'm OK now but I'm going to keep an eye on it for a while.

This is a notorious problem with several codec packs. The codec packs implement their own thumbnailing process which modifies (or replaces) Window's explorer's process of rendering pictures and videos. In doing this, explorer is at the mercy of the efficiency and efficacy of the implemented thumbnailing process to do it correctly. If it doesn't do so, or takes too long, you'll get the slow green bar at the top of the Window as it tries to power through it.

The best bet for this is to use a known and effective codec pack like Shark007's codec packs. From my experience in dealing with codec packs over the years, his tend to be the most stable and have the fewest issues (although no codec packs are without issues). Now that you've uninstalled the Divx codecs, run an "SFC /scannow" from an elevated command prompt to make sure no core Windows files have been permanently modified or damaged and then install a more effective codec pack.