Discovering items ...

I am sure many people saw this when attempting to copy or move or delete a large file or a bunch of files. You try to do this and you see a little window that you expect will show you the progress and eventually it will, but it starts with the message "Discovering items ..." and sits on it for quite a long time, sometimes as long as a minute.

Now, this is not the first time this is asked. I looked up old threads on this forum and also on Microsoft forums (or social answers, whatever they are called). The standard Microsoft answer to this is useless - they are talking about start-up applications, third-party codecs and something else, which honestly I don;t think has anything to do with the problem.

The best response on this Forum that I have found is to press control (or maybe it was shift, sorry for that) and then delete, this way you bypass the Recycle Bin. But unfortunately this does not work for me either. Another suggestion is to rebuild the index - but isn't index is for the search to be fast, why does Windows need to search for the item that I point it to?

Finally, I've seen several suggestions of third-party software and even Microsoft software that one can use to copy files. But I don't quite understand why do I need to use some third-party software to perform the most basic task the OS can be charged with - copy a file! I guess if there is no resolution to this issue *and* there is a full-blown explorer replacement that takes place of explorer completely - I could give it a shot, but to start a whole other program just to move a file - I don't think I want to do that.

SP1 has improved my file copying speeds, but this "Discovering .." issue is still there and it's very annoying - again, if I am pointing at a file that I want to delete, what's there to discover, just delete it and move on!

So, I decided I'll ask again, if someone knows something more recent on this, perhaps there is a solution that I am not aware of.

I found that when I saw this long discovering message (while trying to delete) that the quickest way was to go the task manager. near the bottom of the list of active processes was a "taskhost.exe". Killing this process resulted in the discovery phase ending at that exact moment and the file(s) were immediately deleted. In my scenario, this taskhost process was severely slowing down deletions. Stopping it ensured that all deletions passed immediately, there and henceforth.

unifex said:

I am sure many people saw this when attempting to copy or move or delete a large file or a bunch of files. You try to do this and you see a little window that you expect will show you the progress and eventually it will, but it starts with the message "Discovering items ..." and sits on it for quite a long time, sometimes as long as a minute.

Now, this is not the first time this is asked. I looked up old threads on this forum and also on Microsoft forums (or social answers, whatever they are called). The standard Microsoft answer to this is useless - they are talking about start-up applications, third-party codecs and something else, which honestly I don;t think has anything to do with the problem.

The best response on this Forum that I have found is to press control (or maybe it was shift, sorry for that) and then delete, this way you bypass the Recycle Bin. But unfortunately this does not work for me either. Another suggestion is to rebuild the index - but isn't index is for the search to be fast, why does Windows need to search for the item that I point it to?

Finally, I've seen several suggestions of third-party software and even Microsoft software that one can use to copy files. But I don't quite understand why do I need to use some third-party software to perform the most basic task the OS can be charged with - copy a file! I guess if there is no resolution to this issue *and* there is a full-blown explorer replacement that takes place of explorer completely - I could give it a shot, but to start a whole other program just to move a file - I don't think I want to do that.

SP1 has improved my file copying speeds, but this "Discovering .." issue is still there and it's very annoying - again, if I am pointing at a file that I want to delete, what's there to discover, just delete it and move on!

So, I decided I'll ask again, if someone knows something more recent on this, perhaps there is a solution that I am not aware of.

Newt' said:

I found that when I saw this long discovering message (while trying to delete) that the quickest way was to go the task manager. near the bottom of the list of active processes was a "taskhost.exe". Killing this process resulted in the discovery phase ending at that exact moment and the file(s) were immediately deleted. In my scenario, this taskhost process was severely slowing down deletions. Stopping it ensured that all deletions passed immediately, there and henceforth.

Interesting! Do you mean that there is some task that is scheduled to perform any time one deletes a file?

Open Task Manager and sort processes by CPU to trace what is hanging the copy function, which is likely what is happening and what MS is trying to get at in their responses you reference.

When I tried this awhile back i found that Firefox was leaching 13-40% of CPU if open while copying. Changing to IE8 solved the issue for the most part, but it still occurs briefly - possibly low-resource hanging due to copy function's lower priority.

I don't know, but what I do know is... when I log in-- I have one "taskhost.exe" running. If I leave it running, I bump into this discovery message. If I kill it, I never encounter this discovery message and all deletions / copying goes by without delay.

unifex said:

Newt' said:

I found that when I saw this long discovering message (while trying to delete) that the quickest way was to go the task manager. near the bottom of the list of active processes was a "taskhost.exe". Killing this process resulted in the discovery phase ending at that exact moment and the file(s) were immediately deleted. In my scenario, this taskhost process was severely slowing down deletions. Stopping it ensured that all deletions passed immediately, there and henceforth.

Interesting! Do you mean that there is some task that is scheduled to perform any time one deletes a file?

You might want to check out TotalCommander as it proves to be quite helpful for such situations where doing a lot of copying or deleting from several places.

Total Commander - home

I know what you're talking about, though. I've seen it a couple times but it doesn't happen that often, only when doing huge (numbers of) file copy operations like you're talking about. My system is pretty quick so it's never just hung there for an excessive amount of time, so I wonder why it does for yours when you've got an equally fast system. The index could very well have something to do with it as indexing is for any type of access to files, not just searches. Files still need to be accessed to delete them, so the index still matters just as much here. Rebuilding the index wouldn't be the worst option to consider in this situation and wouldn't cost you anything but a bit of time. I'd try it and see what happens. You never know.

I have had similar issues with my computer, it's some sort of problem with windows its self, this is not to do with third parties as the problem was not resolved in safe mode, there must be some sort of conflict, rebuilding the index did not fix the problem for me, nor did disabling WMPNTK.EXE, it did for a time but not for long. I did find a solution though. find the solution on this page:

Media Problems with Windows discovering items, not deleting or opening

this hopefully helps, but i have had this problem with audio and not video but I bet it works for video as well. If you use this solution you might have to do it a few times to get it to work. I also found that the file was still there until a reboot and then the file disappeared and the problem was fixed. This was very annoying but at least I did not lose my work!!

I tried the killing taskhost.exe that was mentioned in here but that didn't work for me. still "discovering items". I had two taskhost.exe processes, I killed them both. 10 minutes later, still discovering items when moving a file. Note, I am moving, not copying, which there seems to be no information on the internet about this issue and moving a file or multiple files