I grabbed the enormous zip file off my data pipe drive and saved it onto the desktop.
Instead of nicely expanding, showing the sub-folders, it just started spinning its wheels.
When I came back to it ten minutes later, it was still chugging away.
I killed the explorer.exe process, restarted explorer and went on with my workflow.
At least, until WinZip started having issues.
Just like explorer, it was eating my full cpu and doing absolutely nothing with it.
In principle, Vista’s method is a good idea.
XP always suffered from long delays whenever you expanded a zip file, particularly over a data pipe connection.
Thus, killing performance across the board with no tangible return.
The quickest way to do this is to use the excellentShellExView applicationto suspend the explorer shell extension.
Select all of the “Compressed” items, right-click and select “Disable Selected Items”.
Once you’ve selected the explorer, smack the “End Process” and confirm in the ensuing dialog.
The taskbar will disappear, along with all of your file explorer windows.
Now select “New Task (Run…)” from the File menu.
After this, you shouldn’t have any more problems with large zip files locking up the system.
