Windows Explorer issues / Autoruns

[BobCharlie]

Couple days ago noticed I was getting that green loading bar of death if I selected "Computer" from the Start icon. So once you clicked "Computer" to bring up the drives, it'd load indefinitely, and in most cases not even list the drives. This does NOT happen in "Safe Mode" for whatever reason.


1st tried end task-> Explorer in Task Manager, then "new task" another Explorer, no dice. Checked the drives and they are set to general content. Tried system restore to a point before this was happening. The restore took, but problem persisted. Found a registry tweak that involved creating a folder that was supposed to disable the deal with the thumbnails or whatever Windows does with sorting. After adding the tweak, I rebooted the system and it worked perfectly, with lighting fast drive opening. All my games and such are on B: drive, so I regularly go there via "Computer". Everything was opening fine.

Anyways, the fix lasted a day. No idea what's going on. Other than PC being on all day, haven't done ANYTHING that could have changed this? Explorer will stop responding now, and last time it froze up when resetting page allocation. Couldn't even open Task Manager (which is rare) and was forced to do a hard reset as nothing was responding. When I had Autoruns open, I opened the explorer instance that shows a previous comparison save from a year ago. That box froze for a good 5 seconds. Dunno if it's an issue with the search indexer or what.

Also, a quick look into Autoruns is showing missing Windows NT stuff under the header:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Drivers32
5/22/2015 7:47 AM

msacm.ac3acm File not found: ac3acm.acm
VIDC.FFDS File not found: ff_vfw.dll
VIDC.LAGS File not found: lagarith.dll
VIDC.X264 File not found: x264vfw64.dll
VIDC.XVID File not found: xvidvfw.dll

HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Drivers32 7/12/2015 2:39 AM

msacm.ac3acm File not found: ac3acm.acm
VIDC.FFDS File not found: ff_vfw.dll
VIDC.LAGS File not found: lagarith.dll
VIDC.X264 File not found: x264vfw.dll
VIDC.XVID File not found: xvidvfw.dll

Are these .dll important? No idea why they are missing as I never mess with Windows files.
Very frustrated as it's probably something really simple, but it's not actually crashing and producing a dump or anything. Both partitions are rather full 150gb on both with around 30 gb free on each. Dunno if that'd be an issue or not. Just strange how one minute it's opening drives 100% OK then bam, green loading bar and non responsive Explorer. Never had it this bad before. And again, Safe Mode isn't effected by it and everything open 100% in Safe Mode.

 

[BobCharlie]

Also, been noticing "Task Scheduler" is running twice. No idea why there are 2 instances going sometimes but it started about the same time as the green bar and explorer freezing. I double-checked their origin and both are pointing back to the windows folder, although both are showing differing amounts of memory usage.

 

[BobCharlie]

Dunno what's going on. After more issues, went back to safe mode and tried a system restore again. Only this time it stated I had none? For whatever reason, ALL my system restore points were erased except a back up I made I last year.

Actually, both partitions have 250 gb, C: drive freed up a ton of space, which I'm guessing was the restore points. B: only had 35 gb free which I freed up an extra 60gb. Not sure if it's my case or not, but Windows can apparently delete restore points at will, SILENTLY if drive space gets too low. 35gb free shouldn't be that low though, unless something happened on C.

Anyone have an idea what's going on? Win7 NEVER gives any issues, now all of a sudden everything is getting weird. Explorer is still hanging at times, and opened boxes sometimes take awhile to actually open.

 

[BobCharlie]

I was able to link the issues to the HD being too full, and having pagefile set too large along with hibernate being activated. Hibernate and pagefile BOTH created 16gb files EACH, which went over my HD free space. Windows then silently ERASES restore points and windows back ups. So that's where the system restore files went. Also had a minor power outage which apparently ERASED files all over the HD.

I tried for a full day trying to repair drive but no luck. Couldn't even get a restore disk created either. Decided to format my old XP drive, create new partition, then reinstall Win7. Doing this while leaving original win7 install untouched, allows game saves and whatnot to still be acessed and transferred over.

IF you have Win7 SP1 installed, you can NOT use you original Win7 (pre- SP1) install disc to fix the issue. You are "supposed" to have created a new restore disc prior. If your system is too corrupted to create a new disc, you'll be screwed.