Interesting explorer.exe issue

I have discovered that when I open a picture file (.jpg) from the desktop it opens fine, but when I go to close it Photoviewer freezes up. It only does it when opening picture files from the desktop.

If I open them from a folder anywhere else on the PC they open and close fine.

I've read tons of forums and help posts and tried everything recommended, but nothing fixes the issue. I have done a full repair/install on the system to no avail.

My system is Win7 Pro 64-bit.

This is driving me nuts!

Clean booted, msconfig set as requested. Here's the screen shots.

Also, I created another user account on the system to see if it was something corrupt in the profile. At first photoviewer works fine, but after a minute or so, it starts exhibiting the same issues on the new user.

I've scanned system with a couple of virus tools, it's clean.

With a picture opened from the desktop, task manager/performance after 7-8 minutes shows nothing on CPU or memory. CPU blips to 2-3% every 30-45 seconds, but that's it.

I did discover something though...

While the picture is open, if I move the cursor over the taskbar, the hour glass shows...and then, after approximately 4-5 minutes, the hour glass goes away (normal cursor) on task bar and THEN I can close the picture without it hanging up!

So, it seems when I open a picture from the desktop, it's like the system is waiting for something that takes several minutes to complete, and then it is ok....but only when a picture is opened from the desktop.

I have a Western Digital "My Cloud" NAS and store all my pictures on it (photography is a hobby of mine) and opening them from the NAS, I can close them right away with no issue (or from any other folder on the local system)...it's just the desktop that takes 4-5 minutes before I can close it without an explorer.exe hang.

And another interesting find...

When I click on a picture, Photo Viewer opens full screen. If I then click the box in upper right to make it smaller, I get a smaller window with the picture, but also the full screen image stays behind it. See screen cap below:

The smaller window I can manipulate the image (rotate, resize, etc). After several minutes the full screen image closes on its own and I can then close the smaller window with no error. It's like the picture is opened twice?

Arcsoft is an EXIF data reader for looking at the EXIF data on picture files. I removed it completely and uninstalled Java, then installed latest Java version.

Still a no-go...same problem.

Ram4x4 said:

...then installed latest Java version.

Why? What do you use Java for?