Explorer sometimes freezes on 'Recent Documents'

This seems like a bug in TLB but obviously I can't be sure. I just want to flag it up and would appreciate knowing if anyone has seen anything similar, or any suggestions for how to pin down what's happening.

Most times when I mouse over the virtual folder 'My Recent Documents' in the TLB Quick Launch Bar it works fine, but occasionally it seems to make Explorer freeze leaving the expanded menu for 'My Recent Docs' open on-screen.

Here's what I know about it:
1. To get things working again I have to kill explorer.exe from Task Manager and restart it.
2. The event leaves no record in Event Vewer.
3. It happens perhaps once a week. (It makes me think twice before checking 'My Recent Documents').
4. I've not seen Explorer freeze on other Quick Launch items - only 'My Recent Documents'.
5. I've waited up to 10 minutes after a freeze but with no sign of self-recovery.
6. I use two screens in extended desktop mode and with Ultramon providing a second taskbar. Applications that are open on screen 2 keep working but when I drag them they leave a trail on the screen.
7. The freeze occurs before I even try to mouse onto anything in the popped-up menu.

TLB is version 4.4 running on fully-patched XP SP3 and I'm not using the Stand-Alone version of TLB.

Please can you post the screenshot with opened "My Recent Documents" menu? How many the items in the menu?

Also check if the option TLB Settings->General Options->"Load Virtual Folders in background" is turned on. This option can prevent the freezing.

Thanks for responding.

Relevant screenshot attached. There are currently 56 entries but I've seen the problem occur when there have been substantially less than this. Currently I have the filter set to 20 days as in the second screenshot.

The option TLB Settings->General Options->"Load Virtual Folders in background" is turned on.

Is this possible you have the locks when there are the shortcuts to the disconnected network drives or to the deleted files?

Is this possible you have the locks when there are the shortcuts to the disconnected network drives or to the deleted files?

It's possible there may have been deleted items but I don't think there were any items from disconnected network drives.

However while starting to make this reply I had an interesting event happen. I was using a different laptop to the one I was using last time. By chance instead of clicking the 'Reply' button I moused over Recent Items in the TLB bar and immediately the bar froze, just like before. The attached screen shot shows how it was when it froze.

The difference is that this machine (Toshiba R500) is running fully-updated Vista Business whereas the other was running XP Pro, and this time there were only seven items in Recent Items. Another difference is that on the R500 the TLB is ‘stand-alone' for toolbars along left, right and top sides of screen and ‘normal TLB (not-stand-alone)’ only for the QuickLaunch bar.

When I moused over the pop-up or the task bar, the cursor changed to Vista's rotating doughnut. Anywhere else on screen the cursor remained active and I could start and use other programs as normal. When I clicked in the task bar a message said Explorer had crashed and at the same time the TLB pop-up became greyed-out.

Before restarting Explorer I opened C:\Users\[user]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Recent using DOpus and tried clicking on the seven items showing in the TLB pop-up. I found all opened normally except the two pdf links. I copied these links to desktop and when I clicked on the copies a message said they referred to deleted items.

At this point I clicked on the Task Bar and accepted to restart Explorer. TLB then worked normally again. I then copied the two dead links back into C:\Users\[user]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Recent but TLB still worked properly. Clicking on the dead links in TLB is now just the same as when I click on them within \Windows\Recent - nothing happens at all.

As a final test I restored the two deleted files back to the Desktop from the Recycle Bin and deleted them again. TLB worked fine before and after with no Explorer crash.

So the conclusions seem to be:

1. The problem occurs in both Vista and XP.
2. Although on this occasion in Vista there were deleted files in Recent Items, this seems to have been only coincidental.

In case it helps I've attached a screenshot of the Vista 'Problem Report' for this event.

Progress report for XP and Vista

On 25-07-2009 I made an AHK script to move the mouse back and forth from Recent Items icon to Start icon every couple of seconds but this has never triggered the crash even when I ran it overnight on both XP and Vista machines (about 16000 separate activations of Recent Items pop-up!). Deleted items were present in the list.

On 26-07-2009 I cleared the Recent Items folder on both machines. (In XP I used right-click on Start, then Properties, Start Menu tab/ Customise/Clear. In Vista I right-clicked on Recent Items in the Start menu and selected Clear List).

The first crash since then with XP was on 11-08-2009, and first with Vista was 13-08-2009. Meanwhile I've been using both machines daily but the main machine is the one running XP.

In the 13-08-2009 Vista crash the frozen Recent Items popup contains only 5 items. As before I had to restart Explorer.exe to recover from the freeze and there seem to be no relevant entries in the Vista Event Logs.

However the frozen window looks like two windows one on top of the other and slightly displaced (see screenshot). Could this be a clue?

However the frozen window looks like two windows one on top of the other and slightly displaced (see screenshot). Could this be a clue?

Hmm... interesting. Try to disable the shadows for menus. This is the only window that can be created with the menu. But the shadow window created by windows.

I've added the 'My Recent Docs' on my toolbar. And I'm waiting when I get the freeze.

Hmm... interesting. Try to disable the shadows for menus. This is the only window that can be created with the menu. But the shadow window created by windows.

Not exactly sure what you'd like me to do - but will this help? I went to make a screenshot of the same pop-up to show what it looks like when not frozen, but it crashed again! (This is on the Vista laptop).

Anyway I took a screenshot of the frozen pop-up and then restarted Explorer and took a second screenshot. So the two examples here show the frozen version (looking as if one is on top of another) and the normal version (looking like just a single pop-up).

Edit 13-08-2009 22:55: I just noticed that the icons for the two Word docs are different in the frozen and unfrozen versions.

Edit 13-08-2009 23:35: I've added data from Vista's 'Problem History' for the TLB/Explorer crashes today at 14:30 and 22:35 (two separate zip files).

Had to add fourth attachment separately.

Try to disable the icons for this menu (right-click->View->No Icons). If this will help then I'll know where to find the problem.

OK, icons disabled.

Perfectly on cue, the pop-up crashed on XP as I opened it to disable the icons :-(

In case it helps I've attached a log of all the crash events in XP and Vista that have happened since I started the topic.

Edit: Seems best to open the attachment with Wordpad. In Notepad all the new-line formatting seems to vanish.

14-08-2009 21:55 Sorry to report that the Recent Items pop-up has just frozen in Vista even with icons switched off. Locked pop-up again has appearance of one on top of another.

Do you use any software that manage the windows positions, size etc.?

The frozen menu looks really strange hock:

Do you use any software that manage the windows positions, size etc.?

No, unless you count a few AutoHotkey scripts that operate only when called on demand. Sorry to give you such a puzzle. The fact is Recent Items is really useful so difficult just to forget it!

List of running processes on the Vista machine attached. (Made using Process Explorer from SysInternals).

Please can you see how many User and GDI Objects takes the process explorer.exe when it freeze? This information can be found in the Task Manager, processes tab. Select the columns in the View->Select Columns...