Paul Hutchinson's Blog

Well Microsoft has done it again, the latest Windows updates are causing problems for many users.

Not all PC’s have problems after update (I’ve seen reports ranging from 0 in 80, up to 2 for 2). I just installed the updates and they caused a 16 second pause for right click context menus. This delay would likely be up to a minute on sub-Gigahertz PC’s and would make a lot of people think that Windows is hung. Un-installing the 908531 update cured the problem for me.

Partial list of symptoms and fixes from MS

In addition to these symptoms others have reported:

• Can’t “Save As” any file from MS Office.
• Can’t run Outlook Express, IE, Windows picture+fax viewer, PaintShopProX, Quick View Plus.
• Can’t activate the start button via keyboard (but by mouse click OK).
• Can’t activate the start button by any means.
• Hang for no apparent reason right-clicking on the desktop.
• Typing a URL in the IE6 address bar, it does not auto complete.
• Using explorer to look at any folder, on closing it launches another instance of explorer, but it is blank.

In addition to the fixes in the MS KB article others have had success with:

• Renaming verclsid.EXE to verclsid.OLD it is located in %SystemRoot%System32.
• Un-install security update 908531.

Note that Windows warns of possible update conflicts when you start the un-install however I, and others on the net, have so far seen no problems from ignoring the warning.

Last Sunday I started working on some wedding video editing and transfer to DVD for a friend. Right after I finished rendering the first 1.5Gig MPEG I noticed Windows Explorer using 100% of the CPU resources for a minute or more when I opened the directory with the large file.

I started playing around and found that all my folders with large AVI or MPEG files caused this problem. The problem was especially bad in one folder that has an 18Gig AVI capture file.

Searching around the net for information on this problem I found a number of forums with people having the same problem. The information led me to a Microsoft Knowledge base article with details about the problem. The culprit is Shmedia.dll analyzing the file contents to let Explorer display media specific information about the file. The Microsoft article states that the problem was fixed in SP2 but, since my PC is fully patched I think the problem has come back. Also the article says the problem is only with AVI files but I was seeing it with MPEG files as well.

There are a few different solutions posted around the net for the AVI problem. Looking at the various solutions I chose to use the CLSID renaming method as detailed at pc-speed-up.com.

As I expected, renaming the CLSID to:

 {-87D62D94-71B3-4b9a-9489-5FE6850DC73E}

fixed the problem with AVI files but did not help with the MPEG files.

I looked in the registry to find out what CLSID provided the hook to Shmedia.dll for MPEG files. I found that

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT CLSID{c5a40261-cd64-4ccf-84cb-c394da41d590}

is the key for MPEG’s. I renamed the key to:

{-c5a40261-cd64-4ccf-84cb-c394da41d590}

and it fixed the problem for MPEG’s. I hope this helps someone else having this very frustrating Windows problem.

WARNING – manually editing the registry is extremely dangerous if you are not careful you may have to re-install windows to get the PC working again. You have been warned so, don’t complain to me if you screw up your PC by following my information.

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