Arnie <
Arnie@Arnie.com> wrote:
WIn XP Pro latest SP and updates.
Drag-drop a file from one Win Expl to another Win Expl the files do not
show in the target unless I click on a different folder then back to the target .
What's up with that ?
Are the 2 instance of Explorer viewing the same or different drives?
That is, are you using them to copy to the same drive, or across drives?
Is one of the drives external, like USB, networked, eSATA, etc?
Explorer needs to detect a change. Could be something interferring with
the I/O stack (file API) that blocks Explorer from detecting a change.
Shell extensions (programs you install that enhance the right-click
context menu) can interfere with Explorer. In fact, some can be so bad
as to cause Explorer to crash (which means you lose both the file
manager and the desktop), especially if their uninstall is dirty leaving
behind the registry entries pointing to a handler that no longer exists.
Rather than going through every program's config looking for an option
to disable its shell extensions, you can use Nirsoft's ShellEx Viewer (
https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shexview.html) to list all the shell
extensions, and disable them (instead of uninstall them). There can be hundreds of these, including those added my the OS itself. If you sort
by the Product Name column, the shell exts are group by which product
defined them, and can help skip the ones defined by the OS, or
bundleware, like IE. You could also sort by Company name, and focus on
the non-Microsoft entries.
Do you have any mapped (network) drives? If those become unresponsive,
it can interfere with auto-refresh in Explorer. See if disconnecting
from mapped drives gets auto-refresh working again.
Sometimes uers forget or don't understand changes they make with a
registry edit, or when using tweakers. Use regedit.exe to scan the
registry on the string "dont refresh" as a data item name. Should be
under HKCR\CLSID\<someClassID> as a DWORD data item named "DontRefresh"
(no spaces). The CLSID (Class Identifier) can change across different
versions of Windows, so I can specify what you have. If defined, a
value of 1 means the disable is enabled (Explorer won't refresh). If 0,
the disable is disabled (Explorer should refresh unless interferred by
other processes, like shell extensions). If absent (you don't find it),
the default gets used (0 = disable DontRefresh, so auto-refresh).
I ran into that occasionally back in WinXP. I'd right-click in the
folder/file list pane, in the context menu create a new folder, but
didn't see the folder. I'd have to refresh (F5) to see the new folder.
When it works, I can name the new folder just after creating it. With
the refresh to see the new folder, it got the name New Folder, because I
wasn't given the chance to give it a name, so I'd have to rename it.
While some users report that doing a Windows restart works (until
whenever the problem gets exhibited again), could be all you need to do
is restart Windows Explorer (which is both a file manager and desktop
manager).
- Open Task Manager.
- Kill all instances of explorer.exe. The desktop disappears because
explorer.exe is also the desktop manager.
- Use Task Manager's File -> New menu to load a new instance of
explorer.exe. The desktop reappears.
Then check if auto-refresh starts working again in Windows Explorer.
For me, it was a rare occasion, like it would reappear after a couple
months. As I recall, I created a shortcut that ran multiple commands,
and added the shortcut to a toolbar in the Taskbar. It was a
"Utilities" named toolbar, for me. It had shortcuts for various tools,
like CCleaner, Lock Workstation, etc, including a shortcut to a .bat
file with the following commands:
@echo off
taskkill.exe /im explorer.exe /f
start explorer.exe
exit
You can save the shortcut wherever you want. It effectively does the
same actions as the above trick of killing and restarting explorer.exe
using Task Manager, but incurs a single-click (because it's a toolbar
shortcut instead on the desktop that would require a double-click,
although saved as a Start Menu entry would also mean just a single-click
... once you drilled to the cascaded submenu with the shortcut).
I still have the Taskbar "Utilities" toolbar with the Restart Explorer
shortcut and the .bat file to which it points. There are still times
even in Windows 7 and 10 where I needed to restart explorer.exe to get
rid of some untoward behavior. Some folks got fed up with Microsoft's anomalies in behaviors with Windows Explorer (explorer.exe) and moved to
a different file manager, like Explorer++. You'd be using a different
file manager, but still be using the same old Windows Explorer as the
desktop manager, and sometime I have to restart Explorer because the
anomaly is exhibited in desktop GUI behavior. From what I see at the
web site (
https://explorerplusplus.com/), it is not installed, just ran,
so you could test it as a portable program. Sorry, they don't mention
which versions of Windows it supports. It's FOSS (Free Open Source
Software). Oh, just found:
https://explorerplusplus.readthedocs.io/en/latest/about_explorer++.html
which says "Explorer++ requires Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8 or 10 (32-bit or
64-bit systems) to run; there is no installation required." However, I
found some forum posts noting Explorer++ also had auto-refresh problems,
but those reported 7 years ago.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)