FreeCommander stops responding

[jbosma]

I experience a fairly frequent bug where FreeCommander stops responding when I try to display a directory. Every time I kill and restart FC, then display the directory, FC freezes and I have to kill it again. There may be some interaction going on between FC and something else running on my system because after a few minutes, the behavior goes away and things start working normally. I don't mean that this always happens in one particular directory on my disk, but rather that when it starts happening with some apparently random directory, it keeps on happening whenever I display that directory, until it stops happening. Then all will be well for between a few hours and a few days until it happens again with some other directory. It looks like something mystifying and transient happens in a directory, but I have no idea what.

This is enormously frustrating because I've experienced this bug for several years and several versions of FC, but have never been able to correlate it with any other software on my system or any operating condition of the computer or anything else. I have tried a lot of things over time. I am pretty sure that it has nothing to do with whether the directory is on a hard disk, CD/DVD, USB flash drive or mapped network drive. It can happen whether network drives are mapped or not, and in fact even when the network adapter is disabled. I have a suspicion that it might be linked to "sort by extension" in FC but given the intermittent nature of the bug, that's hard to prove. Most of the time "sort by extension" works fine - that is the mode I prefer and it is the default setting that I use. But recently I found out that when this nonsense is going on, after killing and restarting FC, if I switch the pane to "sort by name" before displaying the troublesome directory, then it seems there is not a freeze. It's not much to go on and I haven't repeated that experiement enough times to be sure it wasn't a fluke.

Since Explorer does not have a "sort by extension" mode it is not possible to really make an exact comparison test, but within its limits, Explorer is always able to display the sick directory.

I realize that as a bug report, the above description is not very helpful. Instead I'm asking a question - does FC have any debugging mode or switch that I could use to generate some kind of diagnostic output that might begin to shed some light on this annoying problem? FC is so darned useful in every other way that I put up with it. But I sure wish I could come up with a strategy to make this reproducible and turn it into a bug report instead of a whine.

Thanks...

[Marek]

What about your AV program?
Do you use version control system (e.g.SVN) with additional overlay icons?
You could test FC with "registered" and with "fixed" icons.