Whenever I use the open/save dialog, the application freezes and I have to terminate it

Anonymous
2014-12-13T03:13:22+00:00

I've researched this for a month before posting this. I have tried all solutions and I'm still having this problem.

Half the time when I do something with an application that brings up the Explorer dialog such as Open, Save, Save As etc. the application freezes and I have no choice but to terminate it. This happened most frequently with a video editor I used, sometimes after spending an hour editing the video all my progress is lost because I had to terminate the frozen app. This happens with Firefox, this happens with just about every app that summons the Open/Save Explorer dialog.

So far I have tried:

Using a different/default theme since I use a custom one. This appeared to solve the problem for the first few minutes as my video editor stopped freezing when clicking Open or Save video file. But then it froze on the 5th instance or so.

Deleting the ComDlg32 registry key. Sometimes this helps temporarily, sometimes it doesn't. Clearly useless.

Verifying my comdlg32.dll was not corrupt (sfc /scannow). It wasn't corrupt.

Unchecking "Launch folder windows in a separate process" in Folder Options in the Control Panel. This helped the most. Now the explorer dialog freezes only 10% of the time instead of 50%. But obviously the problem still persists so my question is WHY?

I've run into numerous problems as I upgraded to Windows 7 from XP. Not to say I never had issues on XP but at least basic things like this functioned. Basic usability is a frequent problem now since I upgraded with all kinds of random instances of design backwardsness as if I've downgraded.

Windows for home | Previous Windows versions | Files, folders, and storage

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  1. Anonymous
    2014-12-26T08:34:57+00:00

    Hi,

    Thank you for replying.

    After you create the profile, you can copy the files from the existing profile. You must have at least three user accounts on the computer to complete these steps, including the new account you just created. You will be copying all the require files which were associated with your previous user account.  New user account will work like your previous user account. You will not loose any files , you are just copying all the files from your previous user account to new user account.

    Please go through that Microsoft article from my previous post which will give your brief explanation how to fix corrupted user profile and how to copy files to new user account.

    Let us know if you need any more assistance with Windows 7.

    Thank you.

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  2. Anonymous
    2014-12-26T08:03:36+00:00

    It says the user profile contains all the custom settings (which I do not want to lose as I have no patience to reconfigure everything all over again). You suggest to simply copy all the files from the old user to the new user. What exactly will I be losing if I will be copying everything over?

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  3. Anonymous
    2014-12-26T04:23:48+00:00

    Hi, 

    Thank you for your reply.

    I am glad to know that issue is not persisting on different user account. It indicates your previous user account has been corrupted, you can copy the files from previous user account to new user account. I suggest you to refer to the section "copy files to the new user profile" from the Microsoft article below:

    http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/fix-corrupted-user-profile#1TC=windows-7

    Let us know if you need any more assistance with Windows 7.

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  4. Anonymous
    2014-12-25T19:15:57+00:00

    I am not 100% sure but I am convinced the issue does not persist on a different user account. The open/save dialog did not freeze even once as of yet on the new account.

    I want to fix this issue on my problematic user account though, I hope I don't have to make a new one.

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  5. Anonymous
    2014-12-25T06:56:58+00:00

    Hi,

    Thank you for your reply.

    If it works fine with different user name and password  then you don't have to use DISM command. I would like to confirm whether issue persists on different user account or not. 

    Let us know the status so that we can proceed with the next step of action.

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