One of my folders is killing my entire computer. Or something.

Tried to encode a video in Adobe Media Encoder CS6. It got most of it done and then ran into an I/O error.

Delightful. I tried again, and it just locked up completely. Stopped responding. I checked the folder, the entire folder was marked "read only". Unchecked that, clicked ok, had another look and it was marked "read only" again. Checked a few other folders. Every folder on my entire PC is marked Read Only, but now I can't load anything in Windows Explorer, it just sits there with a blank screen. Fun.

Reboot time! Load up AME, have another go...it locks up again. Folder is still Read Only, and for some reason all the file thumbnails are a blank page. Right clicking on the files does nothing. This too affects every single folder on my entire PC. And if I click on "My Computer", it is again just completely blank although it appears clicking on drives in the navigation area on the left still allows me to look at them, not that I can do anything with them. No thumbnails. No right-click function. Files do still open, so there's that I guess.

Everything runs just fine until I try to do something with this one folder and then it all goes to hell. WTF?

EDIT: Crashing AME restored right-click functionality.

First job is run a full disk check to fix any disk errors

Check disk is clean.

Check disk on my boot drive is also clean. sfc /scannow is clean.

Encoding a file from an external drive works fine.

Even just navigating to the problem folder, without even trying to open any of its files, causes issues. It looks fine initially but as soon as I hit " back" in Windows Explorer all the thumbnails are gone for the entire drive. Possibly all drives, I didn't check.

The external drive encode is still running - it was something I needed to do anyway, not just a meaningless test - so I'll test out copying later.

Now even trying to open that folder in Explorer at all is causing issues. Long slow green progress bar in the address bar, hourglass cursor, etc. The folder isn't opening at all.

Windows Explorer starts disliking things two or three folders above the one I was working in. That's about 150GB of files, so no I can't just shuffle it elsewhere at the moment.