Heyos .. it's been a long time since I used litestep (can you say 24.5 .. I knew you could) .. anyway, I just wiped my system and loaded up a new install of win2k pro sp 4, updated all the criticals, updated to directx 9.0a, updated media player, installed mozilla 1.5 and then installed litestep using the 3.0 installer. I left explorer as my filemanager and rebooted and wallah .. litestep again after all these years. BUT, explorer crashed when I tried to use it. No problem I thought, I'll just load up Directory Opus 6 .. did that, rebooted, and bang .. Directory Opus froze up too.

Okay ... but that isn't the end of it. If I open up a filemanager into My Documents .. no problem .. anywhere else .. no problem .. but if I try to open My Computer ... freeze-up. Any ideas? This wasn't happening before I installed litestep.

Seawolfe

Do you have any network mappings, or other non local or removeable drives that could be hanging the system as they are enumerated?

Hmm .. I do have an internal zip drive and a jazz drive on the system .. though .. after checking .. the jazz drive is not on.
No network mappings at this time.

I can navigate into the network.

I just rebooted again and when I started Directory Opus it said that the name of the directory or file I was trying to open was invalid. I haven't changed the name of any directories since installing everything so I'm not sure why I am getting that. This error comes up when I reboot and open Opus Directory (which is defaulting to My Computer). If I click on My Computer to open it or to read it after clearing the error it locks up the file manager again (I can do whatever else I want, just not open the file manager). If I navigate the network or go into My Documents I am fine.

I found the problem .. though it doesn't make sense .. it was hanging up on a CD-Rom Drive. Took the CD out and everything is fine.

Makes sense - Explorer and DOpus (under the default DOpus settings) both try to spin up any CD drives in the system before displaying the contents of the folder tree, so they can display the name of the cd beside the little icon right off the bat. A silly practice if you ask me - it'd make more sense to display everything then UPDATE the cd rom's label... but MS doesn't listen to me because I have *good* ideas and that's the LAST thing they want... ;)

Anyway yeah, as explorer/dopus tries to spin up your drives, if the cd rom is having trouble reading the cd, the program will essentially hang while trying to read the cd label.

Solutions:

- Explorer: Just make sure there's no CD in the drive when you open it... Quite a hassle.

- DOpus: In the Settings menu choose Preferences. In the Lister Defaults section of the prefs, in the Initial Folders tab, there's a sub-section titled "Prevent automatic loading of certain types of folders:"... Check CD-ROM's (and for good measure, check Floppies as well).

Using the DOpus solution you're free to keep CD's in your drive and it won't slow down the opening of your file manager :D

Note to everyone else who reads this: If you don't know what Directory Opus is all about, google it up right now. Going from Explorer to DOpus is like going from a Pentium 75MHz to a P4-2GHz system ;) Faster, more stable, and lots of REALLY usefull features like mapping hotkeys to jump to specific directories to save navigation time, etc.

Dopus is the best filemanager ever made even if the name sounds like "dope"