Installation of Eraser causes Explorer to hang/crash

  • Thread starter Thread starter Anonymous
  • Start date Start date
A

Anonymous

Guest
I installed version 5.6 today on my very stable and well-maintained Win98SE desktop machine and all was fine until I right-clicked to bring up a context menu on a folder and Explorer hung indefinitely (hourglass). After a BSOD stating "System is Busy!" and a forced restart I was back in business.....unless I attempted another right-click. This also happend with most files, but not when right-clicking on the desktop (where Eraser's shell integration is not used). That lead me to believe there was a conflict with these file types & folders, one where maybe another program was associated with a similar context menu function call and confusing Explorer. I checked this thoroughly with a context editor I have and temporarily gave exclusivity to Eraser for "cleaning" or other duplicate functions. Still happened. Removed all references to Eraser and it still happened. Yes, I unchecked the shell integration in Erasers Properties a while back as my 1st attempt at resolution. Didn't help. Uninstalling Eraser brought back my normal functions and stability. No problems.....but no Eraser! Then I tried version 5.3 and got the same results, but trying version 5.1 resulted in success and NO hanging or crashes. Anyone know WHY this might be happening and why 5.1 works when the others don't?

Also, as I'm mostly interested in Eraser for the EraserD program (DOS functions), I noticed all three versions I installed have vastly different sizes of EraserD while functionality remains unchanged. Am I wrong, and is there an advantage to EraserD in 5.6 that I'll be missing using 5.1?

Thanks!
 
Under eraser preferences turn off entropy polling.


With eraserd I recompiled it with DM C for DOS. As Microsoft no longer support DOS I had to find another compiler that did.

Garrett
 
right-clicking causes system to hang indefinately...

;i have had this problem as well, though on windows 2000 SP4 box. thx for the tip. i was wondering what happened!

;cRaig
 
I thought this background entropy polling was disabled by default. If it keeps causing problems, why do people keep enabling it? Maybe this feature should be removed altogether?
 
Anonymous said:
I thought this background entropy polling was disabled by default. If it keeps causing problems, why do people keep enabling it? Maybe this feature should be removed altogether?
Click to expand...

It is disabled by default, but unfortunately to the many non-techies out there, it has that sort of "cool feature" sound about it, so people automatically click it as an option and then forget about it, believing that it has to be enabled in order to reap the complete benefits from Eraser.
 
I've had this same problem with 5.3 - 5.7 on wXPH. And unless entrophy is enabled by default, this isn't the cause of the problem I'm having. The minute I install Eraser, I got the right-click hanging problem.

Any suggestions? Haven't been able to use Eraser for sometime now. :( I'd really like to though.

Help!
 
Hi,
Have you got a registry cleaner?

Uninstall eraser and delete the eraser directory and erasext.dll from system32. If you cannot delete erasext.dll rename it to erasext.dlo and reboot.

Do a filefind for any other copies of eraser and delete them.

Run the regcleaner.

Reboot.
Reinstall eraser.

Turn off entropy polling.

What happens now?

Garrett
 
Well, I followed the instructions you gave admin. Oddly enough, I didn't have to do any of the things you mentioned. I had backed up to a previous restore point after the last install of Eraser (where I experienced the odd right-click behavior we're discussing here), so there were no eraser files or registry entries. So, I just reinstalled Eraser...and no problems thus far.

This is too weird! I appreciate your help though. :) It might be helpful to just tell us what/where the files and registry entries are, instead of having us search for them.

Thanks again! I'll keep you posted.
 
Right click hangs.

I know this is an old thread, but I had to sort this problem on a friends laptop. Here's the quick answer. The problem is from the shell extensions.
I used ShellExView to disable non-windows shell extensions one by one until the problem disappeared, thus identifying erasext.dll as the bug. Replacing this file, which appears to have corrupted fixed the problem. Un- and then re-installing Eraser will fix this. I merely copied the file to a floppy from my pc and pasted it into %systemroot%/system32, allowing the original to be replaced (Using the file from the DLL cache did not work.) to double check this was the problem, and it worked fine. Any admins reading this, if you haven't already sussed this, erasext.dll is where to look.
I hope this helps somebody. (Just fixing stuff with re-installs doesn't do it for me. I like to know what's broke and why.)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top