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Windows 7 Locks up or slows when opening a folder

There are a few reasons why windows in general may slow down when opening a folder. The simple reason is because windows is doing something or asking some program to do something on it's behalf. At first when people experience slow downs, they may think that they need a processor upgrade, more memory or a new computer alltogether. Although these things would definately help the situation they are not the cause and definately not necessarily the only solution.

While opening Filezilla to upload some files to a server I noticed an issue with my downloads folder not opening.

I found that every time I tried to open a specific folder that filezilla would freeze for a bit, and also windows explorer would take a while to process the folder. I realized that there was a large file in the folder ( in excess of 200MB ) that was an exe installer. Now things are starting to become a little clearer, so something is definately chugging away at that folder possibly. I deleted the file from that folder and no longer had the issue. At first one might think immediately that a virus might be in that file or on the computer and causing the nuisance, however, I realized that what was actually stopping me up was my virus scanner which was getting trigger on the folder open. I first came to this conclusion because of the file type that was in that folder as I have had other large files in that folder without slow downs, then when I actually put the file to theory to test by removing the file or shutting down my virus scanner temporarily.

Similar Situations

I have had similar issues while attempting to open projects for visual studio in certain situations which led to the same issues which I at first just passed of as a large number of folders and files in a given path, but later realized that a path traversal even with subdirectory scanning should not slow down a process long enough or with enough cycles to cause a program not responding error. Keep a keen eye when troubleshooting and try not to depend to much on one answer as the final.

Happy Coding.