A solution for Shell Media Handler?

[Uncle Bill]

Hello everybody!

I'm investigating one of the most peculiar issues of XP (I'm not sure about Vista, but I strongly suspect it to be happening there too): the Shell Media Handler preventing the user from moving/deleting a file ("cannot move/delete #.# : file in use by another user/application" errors).

AFAIK, this behavior seems to occur especially when dealing with .AVI files, presumably encoded with divx or similar 3rd part codecs: the shmedia.dll library, responsible for thumbnail generation in WinXP, tries to read through the whole file to create the picture to be displayed in explorer. Since the library is not compiled to natively support compressed video files, it begins to scan said files from start to end to gather additional details, blocking their position in the meantime.

The interesting thing is that thumbnail generation actually happens almost immediately, utilizing the initial frame of each file, so there's no actual need to keep this scanning operation going on.

Here comes my question: would that be possible to patch the dll (or its behavior) to shorten up/break the operation, thus freeing the avi files in a bunch of seconds? If so, can anyone please answer, providing some practical instructions, so I can test my theory? If not, are there any other solutions I should try?

Footnote: I'm aware of registry tweaks provided around the forums regarding the avi handler. Tried them all, with no success. Right now, my temporary solution is using the good old Unlocker app, but I'd really like to realize a permanent solution to this. I'm also aware that "regsvr32 /u shmedia.dll" would get rid of both the issue and feature, but I would so much like to keep the thumbnail generation ON.

Thanks in advance!

[Uncle Bill]

Found a solution by myself....READ it in the correct section of the forum

this can be closed, thx