Whenever I use the open/save dialog, the application freezes

[BlueBonnett]

I've researched this for a month before posting this. I have tried all solutions and I'm still having this problem.

Half the time when I do something with an application that brings up the Explorer dialog such as Open, Save, Save As etc. the application freezes and I have no choice but to terminate it. This happened most frequently with a video editor I used, sometimes after spending an hour editing the video all my progress is lost because I had to terminate the frozen app. This happens with Firefox, this happens with just about every app that summons the Open/Save Explorer dialog.

So far I have tried:

Using a different/default theme since I use a custom one. This appeared to solve the problem for the first few minutes as my video editor stopped freezing when clicking Open or Save video file. But then it froze on the 5th instance or so.

Deleting the ComDlg32 registry key. Sometimes this helps temporarily, sometimes it doesn't. Clearly useless.

Verifying my comdlg32.dll was not corrupt (sfc /scannow). It wasn't corrupt.

Unchecking "Launch folder windows in a separate process" in Folder Options in the Control Panel. This helped the most. Now the explorer dialog freezes only 10% of the time instead of 50%. But obviously the problem still persists so my question is WHY?

I've run into numerous problems as I upgraded to Windows 7 from XP. Not to say I never had issues on XP but at least basic things like this functioned. Basic usability is a frequent problem now since I upgraded with all kinds of random instances of design backwardsness as if I've downgraded.

 

[MilesAhead]

Is this Windows 7 64 bit? Did you go the "clean install" route and end up with a Windows.old folder?

I'm wondering because I tried upgrading from Vista x64 to Windows 7 64 bit and the machine acted very flaky. I decided it wasn't usable like that and restored the backup image I made of the Vista system. I did an upgrade clean install from Vista 32 bit to W7 32 bit and it came out fine.

But please give more details as XP to W7 should be even less likely to succeed than Vista to W7.

 

[BlueBonnett]

No, 32-bit. No Windows.old folder. I would post Process Monitor logs but I can't for privacy reasons as it parses the filenames of document folders and I can't delete entries.

 

[MilesAhead]

Could you give some details how you did the install? When you say "upgrade" it implies you did a product upgrade. But as far as I know there's no way to go directly from XP to W7. That seems to indicate you got a retail version of W7, formatted the HD and installed it?

If you could provide step by step what you did to go from XP to W7 I think it would avoid a lot of confusion and give those reading as well as myself the chance to speculate on the causes much more quickly.

 

[BlueBonnett]

Upgrade install XP to Vista, upgrade install Vista to 7 Ultimate 32-bit. No formatting necessary. People at MS support forums suggested the user profile is corrupted and to make a new one then move all files over to new user folder but I don't wanna lose all my settings. I don't mind troubleshooting the issue.

 

[RolandJS]

A long shot here, explorer.exe operations could be corrupt. Are there security programs and/or monitoring programs that just might be set too assertively? What happens to explorer's open/save/ etc within safe mode? Windows Backup running?

 

[BlueBonnett]

I'm only running COMODO firewall, my antivirus is uninstalled at the moment. But I believe this happened while COMODO was uninstalled as well. This problem happens on a clean boot, not sure if I tried it on safe mode yet. This does not happen at all on a different user profile though.