istari101

Join Date 07/2012

BUG: Groupy causing Explorer.exe to hang/crash

Windows 10 Pro x64, 1709, Build 16299.125

Hello!

I'm less than a week into my 30-day trial of Groupy and am really liking it so far. It's helping me with my workflow and keeping things better organized, and it's allowed me to collapse my desktop environment back down to a single desktop – rather than the more convoluted three virtual desktops that I was always moving things between – which is a huge plus for me. I'm planning to purchase it at the end of the trial, but there's one nagging issue:

While it's been remarkably stable for the most part, it *does* seem to crash explorer.exe / file explorer pretty regularly.

So far this only seems to happen when opening a new instance of file explorer inside a preexisting Grouping of other file manager windows, and usually (only?) inside a Grouping of two or more windows that have been open for a while.

I was wondering if anyone here had suggestions or insights on how to troubleshoot this, if anyone else was experiencing this issue, or if it is a known bug and I should just wait for a program update to fix it. I'm happy to provide more info if needed, so just let me know.

I'm on Windows 10 Pro x64, 1709, Build 16299.125

Here's what I've found so far that can trigger it:

-Opening explorer via Chrome's "show in folder" for downloads
-Sometimes the Windows+E shortcut
-Sometimes opening up the recycle bin via shortcut in Quick Access
-Sometimes opening up Explorer via the Everything desktop search engine

Additional info:

-I generally Group up file manager windows together, so most of the time there are no other programs inside that particular Grouping when explorer hangs and then crashes.
-Sometimes when the newest instance of file explorer hangs, other open instances can still be interacted with for a brief period. However, it usually brings down all open instances within a few seconds.
-I need to be quick about manually restarting explorer.exe via the task manager when it hangs because of Groupy, because if I wait too long I sometimes have to log-off or restart to restore function.
-On the off chance it was just a file permissions issue, I gave everything inside the Groupy program folder elevated permissions. This does not seem to have helped, but perhaps there was another directory where this needs to be changed (like in AppData) as well?
-File explorer is the only thing it seems to have trouble with on my computer. Varied groupings of browsers, LibreOffice, Scrivener, Evernote, and others work pretty well and, so far, crash-free
-I have auto-Grouping enabled for almost every program (Notepad++ is the only exception here), since I like new instances of any given program to open near/with the others

Thanks for reading!

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Same here, using 1.0

Emptying my recycle bin while using groupy caused explorer.exe to crash.

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Opening or interacting with the recycling bin seems to trigger it more than almost anything else at this point, although I don't have a ton of data points after less than a week.

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Neil Banfield

Join Date 04/2001

+1105

Thank you for the feedback. We will investigate further to see if we can see whats causing this.

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Quoting Neil Banfield,

reply 3

Thank you for the feedback. We will investigate further to see if we can see whats causing this.

Thanks!

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Another issue to report:

When trying to move a tab around inside a Grouped instance of Chrome, that tab will *sometimes* bug out and seem to come "unstuck," flashing several times before either disappearing or winding up inside a completely different or new instance of Chrome. It's really hard to track visually when it happens, but I have not yet found any particular set of circumstances that reliably cause this. It also happens whether Chrome is set to auto-Group, never auto-Group, or set with the default behavior.

This has also been happening since I initially installed Groupy, but it happens less frequently/consistently than the issue reported earlier.

In case this is relevant, I use Classic Shell but *not* its more extensive extensions/modifications to explorer.exe (really just the Start Menu mod).

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Can confirm that I, too, am seeing explorer.exe hang almost 100% of the time when attempting to open the recycle bin with any other explorer.exe windows open.

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Getting this same issue with the latest release version. Tons of random explorer crashes when copying or deleting files; sometimes just randomly when doing nothing at all.

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Some Explorer crashes also here. (v 1.1)

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AzDude

Join Date 11/2002

+559

Quoting Neil Banfield,

reply 3

Thank you for the feedback. We will investigate further to see if we can see whats causing this.

as Neil said

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Neil Banfield

Join Date 04/2001

+1105

Are any of you technical enough to provide crash dumps from explorer when it crashes as we have had no luck reproducing here and that would pinpoint the exact location things were going wrong.

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Latest update seems to have *knocks on wood* resolved the issue for me.

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Quoting Neil Banfield,

reply 10

Are any of you technical enough to provide crash dumps from explorer when it crashes as we have had no luck reproducing here and that would pinpoint the exact location things were going wrong.

The v1.1 update seems to have solved the consistent explorer.exe crash issue for me -- huzzah! -- but I'll check the event log and try to harvest any crash dump that Windows generates if it happens again.

I still get the weird flashing/window-jumping Chrome tabs from time to time post-update, although that happens far less frequently now and still isn't consistently reproducible for me. I am due for a proper "nuke and pave" reinstall on my machine, though, so I'll report back in about whether or not that issue persists once I've done that.

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Neil Banfield

Join Date 04/2001

+1105

One additional question, are people using combine tabs with titlebar or tabs above titlebar?

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Neil, yes I use "combine if possible" tabs with titlebar. I just change it to not combine in order to see if it solve the occasional explorer crashes.

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Quoting Neil Banfield,

reply 13

One additional question, are people using combine tabs with titlebar or tabs above titlebar?

My tabs are set to "always place above." I also have "tab bar should extend to full window width" disabled because it caused super buggy behavior and focus issues with the Chrome windows I have up.

Edited to add: "super buggy behavior" with full window width enabled meant that Chrome windows were being permanently suppressed/minimized, even though the title bar continued displaying across the width of the screen the whole time. I was unable to view/maximize those windows properly, and I ultimately had to disable Groupy, change the setting, reenable Groupy, and then relaunch everything to fix it.

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Neil Banfield

Join Date 04/2001

+1105

That's odd as tab bar expanding to full width is purely a visual thing. A colour painted Vs transparency.

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Quoting Neil Banfield,

reply 16

That's odd as tab bar expanding to full width is purely a visual thing. A colour painted Vs transparency.

That's even stranger then. Tuning off the expanding tab bar option definitely fixed the perma-minimized issue though, so I'm at a loss on that one. If I have time this coming week I'll try enabling/disabling it again to see if it was just a fluke.

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Another update: so explorer.exe no longer crashes in the normal sense, but it is hanging intermittently in a way that forces me to restart the process via taskmanager. It only happens when I have multiple instances of explorer running for a sustained period of time, and then one or more of the instances will appear to minimize and flash repeatedly until I restart the process. Here's an example of what that looks like:

Only 1/3 of the windows/instances of explorer.exe are affected in this case, but I've seen as many as three go down in a similar fashion within a few minutes of each other. If I leave it like this long enough, explorer will crash "normally," although since it doesn't come back up in a timely fashion I try to restart the process before it fully errors out. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find anything of note in the event viewer, but it's possible I'm not sifting/screen the logs effectively. If there's something specific I should be looking for I can give it a go the next time this happens to see if anything helpful is being registered.

Also, I'm having odd focus issues with multiple instances of Chrome with Groupy v1.1. This seems to happen randomly -- sometimes minutes after firing up Chrome, sometimes hours or after even a day or more -- but all open Chrome windows will suddenly minimize themselves. (It does *seem* to happen more often as I alt-tab in and out of things, but I'm not sure that's related.) If I mouse over them and have the Aero preview thumbnail up as it happens, I literally see them shrinking until only the top of the Chrome window (mostly the menu/URL bar) is visible. These windows (typically 5-7 windows, 10+ multiple tabs per window) cannot be maximized or otherwise brought back into focus until I either process-kill Chrome or turn Groupy off to regain access to them (although I have to manually resize all Chrome windows afterward).

I'm not sure how actionable any of this is, since I don't generally experience full-on crashes of either Groupy or the processes it's interacting with, but I'm happy to provide additional info about my setup if there's anything that might help here.

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2 weeks later I installed Windows 10 again and nothing unusual so far.

2 Weeks later I installed Fences again and nothing unusual so far.

One week ago I installed Groupy again and it worked fine for the first few days regardless of the grouped windows. (Explore, Excel, Word, as well as mixed groups).

It started crashing as I saved my first Group of 3 open Windows Explorer Windows and it keeps going crashing the explorer windows as soon I open the saved group, but also if I just open a single explorer window.

I deleted the saved group, however, it keeps crashing all explorer windows after a few seconds to 1 or 2 minutes.

I loooooove Groupy, however this is really annoying.

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basj

Join Date 03/2001

+1684

Quoting BertramTasch,

reply 19

Have the same problem, however, it happens only with the Windows Explorer. I had un-installed all Stardock programs 3 months ago to see if which of the programs causes the crashes and indeed, my Windows Explorer stopped crashing.

2 weeks later I installed Windows 10 again and nothing unusual so far.

2 Weeks later I installed Fences again and nothing unusual so far.

One week ago I installed Groupy again and it worked fine for the first few days regardless of the grouped windows. (Explore, Excel, Word, as well as mixed groups).

It started crashing as I saved my first Group of 3 open Windows Explorer Windows and it keeps going crashing the explorer windows as soon I open the saved group, but also if I just open a single explorer window.

I deleted the saved group, however, it keeps crashing all explorer windows after a few seconds to 1 or 2 minutes.

I loooooove Groupy, however this is really annoying.

Hello,

Sorry to hear you are having issues, would like to know more.

1. Windows OS version. Please use Winver to check it.

2. Groupy version.

3. Hardware list

4. Do you reboot your pc? If you do, how often? Daily, weekly?

Thanks

Basj,

Stardock Community Assistant.

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