Thumbnails not all displaying in 2000

[bizzybody]

I've searched the web and found the fix for NONE of the thumbnails displaying for one or more image file types, but that's not my problem.

All file types that 2000 can display thumbnails for in Explorer do, but in _some_ folders the thumbnails will display for the first 20 or 30 or 53 or however many images, then none will display for the rest of them in the folder, no matter what sort option I choose before switching to thumbnail view.

Nifty how I can sort by modified then switch to thumbnails and have the newest files at top or bottom, then go back to details, sort by name then back to thumbnails and there they are by name.

I have some folders with hundreds of images where thumbnails will display for them all, and some with only 100 or so that only the first (variable number) will display.

It's NOT a corrupted file problem, every image will open fine in Photoshop 7.0.1 or MS Photo Editor or Paint. (The few types Paint supports.)

Does Windows 2000 have somewhere a maximum total of allowed thumbnails that needs to be increased?

Possibly related to this is I have it set to cache thumbnails, but it never has. Every time I launch Explorer and open a folder set to Thumbnails, it has to regenerate them all. It'll hang onto them until I exit Explorer.

(Indexing for searching the drives has also always behaved like that, only hanging onto the index until I quit the current Exploer session, but that's most likely unrelated to the thumbnail problem.)

[bizzybody]

Something I've found. If I click size to group the smaller files first, then go to thumbnail, it'll display more of them. If I group the larger files first, it displays fewer thumbnails.

It's also spread to every folder on every drive with images! It appears as if Windows has "decided" that there will be a certain total size of thumbnails per folder and that's all I'm going to get.

I've also found that it creates the thumbnails on two files at a time by using Process Explorer. I can select a folder with images, go to thumbnail view then when it stops, Process Explorer shows two files in the folder with open handles, sometimes more than one handle per file.

Even weirder is that the last row showing thumbnails always has just icons on the LEFT, with a couple of thumbnails on the RIGHT, as if it's generating them in order from left to right.

I haven't installed, or uninstalled, any software that does anything with editing images. I did uninstall DreamWeaver MX, but that doesn't _edit_ images, it just plonks them into HTML.