Sometimes when I pass over movies in a file listing in explorer, Litestep will crash. I thought this may be because explorer tries to show you a preview of the movie, so I closed the preview part and it was still happening. Then I took off the whole side pane (in folder options), and it was still happening.

Sometimes this happens after I've been watching a movie for a minute or so, too, so it's not always immediate.

This has only been happening for a few months, and I've been using Litestep for well over a year.

Although I've not been taking note of every file this happens with, I did notice that for all the times I can remember, it happened with AVIs or WMVs. I'm using WMP 9, and I recently updated my codecs to the latest version. I would imagine if there's a problem with WMP codecs, WMP would give an error, but instead Litestep crashes (taking all explorer windows with it), and WMP keeps right on going.

Anyone else experience anything similar or hear of codecs that are causing problems? It's annoying to have to restart Litestep 100 times a day manually.

On a semi-related note, does anyone know of any good watchdog programs that will patrol the process list and relaunch litestep if it crashes?

Thanks.

have you tried a different video player (i.e. zoom player or crystal player) to find out if its WMP that's doing this?

best thing to do is rule out problems. try a different video player. try playing movies under explorer instead of LS. try a different theme. try different file formats (divx avi, xvid avi, mpg, wmv). the best thing you can do is narrow down the problem and then go from there.


and i used to have a program that let you run exe's as a service, and then just restarted the service. for the life of me i can't think of the name of it, but if i can find it i'll post some links here. very handy tool.

ok, found the tool. it's called Firedaemon. if you're having constant crash issues, you may want to look into this. not sure of the effect of running LS as a service, but hell, anything is worth trying. here's the link:

http://www.firedaemon.com/

i had a problem once my folder of avis got over a certain size (and then the same thing happened to my pics folder) where it kept crashing explorer.

the only similarity to your problem was that it was related to preview.
windows (or at least xp) was trying to preview all of the thumbs which was too much and crashed explorer.

i found info about it here

entering "RegSvr32 /u ShMedia.DLL" into run turns off the dll that attempts to preview files.
the only drawback i've found from using that is that when viewing files in the details view some of the info won't show.
your problem don't sound exactly the same but that might be of some use anyway