Dave-H

Hi Tihiy, No, there is no proof that there is an actual problem. As I said before, the responsiveness of the system seems to be unaffected, which is why I think it likely that the 100% CPU usage indication is an error in the monitoring programs. However, it never happened until I installed the thumbnail viewer, and it returns to normal if the viewer is disabled, which is why I thought it worth bringing it to your attention for investigation. Thanks for the pointer to the MS KB article. Cheers, Dave.

Any update on the apparent CPU usage problem with the thumbnail viewer Tihiy?

Ah, I've got two separate physical processors, presumably single core, so am I right in assuming that there's nothing I can do to improve things as far as how hot the processors run (apart from more and bigger cooling fans of course!)?

I too would be very interested in more information about this. I have dual Xeons and they both run extremely hot all the time. If there's any way of helping with this issue I'd love to know!

@Win2000 I don't know if you're still monitoring this thread, as you haven't posted here for ages, but I must bring a couple of things to your attention. First the good news! My AVS Video Converter now works with your kernel32.dll installed, as of KDW 0.77. As you said previously in this thread that you didn't think that would be possible, I'm really pleased! Now the bad news....... There seems to be an issue with your user32.dll. If it is installed on my system, I cannot log off and on again more than once. It works the first time, but the second time I log off, the system just goes to a blank desktop with the mouse cursor, and goes no further. The keyboard and mouse are still "live" but no keystrokes do anything, including Ctrl>Alt>Delete. The only way out is to do a hard restart on the crate. If I restore the original user32.dll, it all comes good and works fine. I'm afraid that I don't know when this behaviour started. There is also now an issue with your 2kdll.dll, as of KDW 0.77b. If it is installed (version 5.1.2599.8), there are problems with some applications on my system. Specifically, Internet Explorer crashes when run, as does your Windows Media Player 10. They both report exception errors in ntdll.dll. Also, rather strangely, Notepad won't run! There may be other problems, but these are the ones I quickly found. I don't know whether these problems are general, or whether they're happening just on my system. Perhaps others using KDW could comment......... I hope this feedback gets to you somehow win2000. I did try e-mailing you some time ago, and sending you a PM, but no response. You are obviously still developing KDW, as new versions keep appearing, but I really hope that you do pick up this feedback. Cheers, Dave.

I've installed the ME version now, and as you say it seems to be absolutely fine. Thanks. Now I hope Tihiy can find some reason for the apparent 100% CPU usage when his thumbnail program is operating!

Thanks den. I've downloaded and installed it. Is there any reason to use the ME version instead of the 98SE version?

Fair enough, but I never got permanent 100% CPU usage indications anywhere until the thumbnail viewer was installed.

Well, I looked at the CPU usage in Windows System Monitor, and that says 100% too! So it's only Process Explorer which is saying that it's only 4-5%. Cool Beans System Info and Sysmon both say 100%. Maybe PE uses different criteria to measure it? Incidentally, WinTop also says that "Idle" is using nearly all of the CPU, as does Process Explorer. This "problem" (if it really is one) does disappear if I uninstall Tihiy's thumbnail viewer. I didn't actually delete any files, just unregistered gdipthms.dll, and ran "regsvr32 /i browseui.dll". Obviously I lost the video thumbnails and preview frames, but the image file thumbnails and preview frames reverted to the Windows default, and the 100% CPU indication went away. I'm pretty sure that it's the generation of thumbnails and preview frames from video files that's mainly causing the problem. The results with video files seem to vary a lot too. Some do nothing when highlighted, some produce a "Generating Preview..." message which then goes away but no preview frame appears, some produce a preview frame after a delay, some produce one instantly. This is all from QuickTime movie files, and I can't see why some are being treated differently to others. They vary a huge amount in file size, but are mainly all the same codec, Sorensen 3. The results on other video formats seem to be similar, but the majority of my video archive is QuickTime files. Hope this helps to investigate things. Cheers, Dave.

Tihiy, just another query about your thumbnail viewer, now I've used it for a few weeks. I have a system monitor in my system tray called "Cool Beans System Information". I believe that it is no longer in development, but I've used it for years mainly to keep an eye on CPU usage. Since I've had your thumbnail viewer, the usage indication keeps on going to 100% if I browse through files using Windows Explorer, and this is without actually having thumbnail view enabled. All your program is doing is generating preview stills from image and video files on the left of the right-hand pane in Explorer. Once it's gone to 100% CPU usage, it never drops down from that again until I reboot. System performance doesn't seem to be impaired though. The strange thing is, if I look at the CPU usage in Process Explorer, it isn't shown as 100%! "System Idle Process" is shown as using most of the CPU, which I believe is normal, and the actual CPU usage is shown as being around 4-5%. This may well have absolutely nothing to do with your thumbnails program of course, but I'm pretty sure that it only started doing it when I installed it. As I said, the CPU usage reading on Cool Beans only goes to 100% after I've been browsing with Windows Explorer and generating preview frames from images and video files. Not a big deal, but any ideas why this might be happening, and why Cool Beans (which I've always found to be very reliable) has suddenly started showing what may well be spurious 100% CPU usage readings?

I run 98SE and Windows 2000 together, and have them configured to look as near identical as possible. They support each other perfectly. IMO Windows 2000 is far more Windows 98SE's "NT twin" than XP. Long may 98SE endure, despite the ever increasing attempts to kill it!

Well, M$ is never clear in documentation. Fixed, re-download. Thank you Tihiy! :thumbup Works fine now. Now that's what I call service, you're a star! (As well as a genius of course.......)

Any feedback on this Tihiy?

Me again Tihiy! Just another query, this time agout your GDI+ thumbnails. They seem to work fine, and I'm very impressed with the thumbnails from movie files! I have a lot of Quicktime movies on my system, and some produce thumbnails and others don't, even though the movies use the same codec, which is slightly puzzling. Anyway, my main qestion is actually about the size and aspect ratio of the preview thumbnails that appear in Windows Explorer when you select a file. My system used to produce these for image files, as designed, and they were always the correct shape. Now they seem to be a fixed size (set by the parameters in folder.htt) and are always that size, height and width, resulting in many image file previews being very distorted. Is there anything that can be done about that? Sorry to be a pain.

Yes. No. Thanks. I was afraid that you were going to say that!

Hi Tihiy. Just trying out your tools, and I've run into a slight problem with a couple of them. The Task Manager window is cut off at the bottom, and I can only see the top half of the "Description" field, the rest is lost. There seems to be no way of resizing the window or dragging its edges to reveal the missing information. Similarly, the Add/Remove Programs replacement (which is amazing BTW!) has part of its detail cut off on the right hand side. Although you can drag the edges of this window, it doesn't reveal the missing information. I am using large (120dpi) fonts. Is that the problem and is there any way to fix it? Thanks, Dave.

It could indeed be an issue caused by having 1GB or more of RAM fitted, which may be overcome by some configuration tweaks. However it could be the registry size issue which I ran into. Some systems are unhappy if the system.dat registry file gets too big, and won't fit into memory on boot. This seems to particularly be the case if you have certain types of network adapter fitted. To test this, next time it won't boot, try booting into safe mode. This will almost certanly work. Then try going into device manager and disabling your network adapter hardware. Re-boot, and if it now boots successfully, that is almost certainly the problem. If it is the case I can point you at a very long thread to read all about it!

Ah, understood! I don't think that much more than a quarter of my memory is in use if I don't have anything extra running, that's if the Task Manager can be believed, but that is still too much to fit on my drive D: as it is at the moment. It's something I will have to consider the implications of for the future, but I think for the moment I'll look around for other causes without having to do a diagnostic memory dump. Thanks for all the suggestions and information anyway. Incidentally, I just checked my registry settings again, and "CrashDumpEnabled" has set itself back to 0 again! I didn't do that, and I'm sure that I left it set at 1. Would that have been because the system is clever enough to know that it couldn't implement the dump because there isn't enough disk space available? I'd be very impressed if that was the case!

OK, thanks and understood. I don't want to get into resizing my disk partitions just to do a test, but I'll make as big a page file as I can on drive D: and see it that works OK. Does it have to be the only page file, or can it still be split over more than one drive, as the system allows? I could leave my 4GB swap file on E: as it is, and just make an extra 512MB file perhaps on D:, which there is space for. Thanks, that explains it! That's good. My mouse is USB, but my keyboard is PS/2.

Thanks cluberti. I've looked at the article, and I can certainly give it a try. I assume that I need to do the "Memory Dump of the Entire System" option. The others seem to rely on knowing what's actually crashing or hanging, and I don't know that of course! Just a couple of clarifications. How important is it to move my paging file to the same drive where the OS is installed? I have Windows 2000 installed on drive D: (dual boot with Windows 98SE on C:). Drive D: is only a 4GB partition, and although it only has the "WINNT" folder on it (the "Program Files" and "Documents and Settings" folders have been moved elsewhere) there is only about 1GB free. This is nowhere near enough for a paging file of the recommended size (I have 4GB of RAM fitted). The paging file is at the moment a 4GB file (the largest possible as I'm using FAT32) on another drive (E:). Also, the "Complete Memory Dump" option isn't there in my System Properties' "Startup and Recovery" options. All I have is "Small Memory Dump" and "Kernel Memory Dump". I looked at the "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CrashControl" registry key, and the "CrashDumpEnabled" option was present, but set to 0. I have set it to 1 and rebooted, but the "Complete Memory Dump" option hasn't appeared. Thirdly, I see that you have to press a key combination to instigate the memory dump. Is it not very likely that once the system has hung, this won't actually do anything? Sorry to ask so many questions! BTW, I have tried disabling UPHClean, and it made no difference to the problem. Just in case it's relevant, the processes that it's having to forcibly unload are "svchost.exe" and "MsMpEng.exe". The latter is part of Windows Defender.

Thanks guys. When the system "logs off" to a blank desktop, the keyboard is still "live" but no keystrokes actually do anything, including CTRL>Alt>Delete. All I can do is press the reset button on the crate. I do have UPHClean installed, as without it the system would take ages to shutdown anyway (hangs for several minutes on "Saving Your Settings"). That's been the case for a long time. In fact the problem started quite some years ago after I installed one of Microsoft's "Critical Updates". When I queried it with them, installing UPHClean was their answer! I remember thinking at the time that actually fixing the problem might have been a better idea than just installing something to hide it.............. Anyway, I will try disabling the UPHClean service just in case it's causing the logoff problem. It is still puzzling me as to why I can log off and on again once, but not twice! Cheers, Dave.

Sorry if this has been covered before, but I can't find anything directly relevant to the problem I'm having. I am using Windows 2000 SP4, and have until recently been using it for a long time with just a single user profile. Recently I decided to keep an unused profile as a sort of backup which I could use for testing and diagnostic purposes. I now have a profile called "Admin" (the test profile) and a profile called "Dave" (my normal profile). They are both members of the Administrators' Group. The Admin profile was originally a straight copy of the Dave profile, but has now become slightly different of course. There is no software or hardware that is installed on one profile and not the other. My problem happens if I try to switch profiles more than once. If I log on to either at startup, all is fine. If I log off and log on again to the same profile, all is fine. If I log off and log on to the other profile, all is fine. However, if I then try to log off, or restart, the desktop disappears, but insted of giving me back the logon screen, I just get left with a blank desktop with the mouse cursor, and that's it! No matter how long I leave it it never goes any further, and I have to do a forced hardware reboot. This often results in a forced disk check, but is otherwise then OK. Basically, the problem is that I can only log off and on again once. If I try to log off a second time, the system hangs. Anyone come across this one? I do have a lot of what I perceived to be un-necessary services disabled. Have I disabled one too many?

Sadly so at the moment, but there's an awful lot of kudos waiting for anyone who does manage to do it!

Well at least that explains why they weren't offered as ports for the modem! Try scanning for plug and play devices and see if they're now detected. I'm surprised that they haven't been already anyway. If that fails, try adding them manually using the Add Hardware wizard. If the COM ports are now in Device Manager, try the modem install again. With a bit of luck you might now be offered COM 1-4 as options. Try using COM 3 as that seems to be the norm for modems.

Welcome to the Board Richard! What are you actually trying to install? You say "updates". Do you mean MS updates? If you're trying to install other programs, is the install.exe or setup.exe file not showing on the installation disk(s), but other files are?