What do you do whan "save early and save often" backfires?

November 14, 2007 3:26 AM

How do I solve this annoying Vista bug? About 10% of the time when I open a file browser dialog from within a program (save as, open file, etc.) the program immediately closes. No error, no warning, the program is just gone. I have not been able to find a solution with google.

This happens a lot. Like I said, about 10% of the times I press "save as," but it is random as far as I can tell. You can imagine how frustrating it is to have the "save" command booby trapped like this. It happens in firefox when I download files (save to location), Word when I open or save as, notepad when I open or save as. It happens in photoshop and in IE and almost everything else. The only programs that seem to be safe are java based (eclipse, adobe flex).

Dell laptop, 4 months old, came with vista business, and the problem has existed from the beginning.

posted by Nothing to computers & internet (6 comments total)

If it doesn't happen using Ctrl + S, or similar keyboard shortcuts, but does happen when you're using the touchpad/mouse - right click menu, it's probably a click rate/touchpad setting. It's fairly easy to inadvertently double click the Vista thumbnails.
posted by paulsc at 3:39 AM on November 14, 2007

It happens when the file browser dialog is displayed, whether it was brought up by a mouse click or a keyboard command. And to be clear: it is not the save dialog which closes, it is the entire parent process. ctrl+s on an unsaved file in photoshop (or any other program) results in photoshop closing about 10% of the time.
posted by Nothing at 5:29 AM on November 14, 2007

What does the event log say?
posted by mrbugsentry at 5:45 AM on November 14, 2007

This is a complete wild shot in the dark from somebody who has never even seen Vista but has had a similar problem on Mac OS X! I have found that certain programs (in my case mostly Java ones) quit when the open/save file browser dialogue is trying to draw a preview of a large file. Does the Vista file browser show previews of the selected file? If so, can you tell Vista not to do that? ie. select a file-browser view that shows only the names of the files and not previews?
posted by nowonmai at 7:30 AM on November 14, 2007

This crash could be caused by a third-party shell extension that is trying to draw the thumbnail image for a file (or extract metadata). If this is the case, you should be able to make windows explorer crash about 10% of the time by going to the same save folder in explorer and changing around the view mode. Then you could start removing files from that folder until you narrow it down to the problematic file. Finally, you could figure out the codec used to render that file and uninstall it.
posted by helios at 5:06 PM on November 14, 2007

The event log is a good idea. I don't know why I didn't check before.

It is not a shell extension (what I initially thought too). It only happens in save dialogs, explorer windows are fine.
posted by Nothing at 12:44 AM on November 15, 2007