Photo Explorer 8.0 has a shutdown problem

wleague · Post by **wleague** » Sat Jun 10, 2006 7:16 pm

Starting today, when I close Photo Explorer 8.0 and then try to open it again, I get a message that says another user is using this application. I am running WinXP home edition, I am the administrator with the only user ID on this machine.
I can open task manager and although there is no program running, the pex.exe IS running as a process. I can have task manager end this process and then Photo Explorer can be opened again. But after it is closed the whole thing happens again.

Any suggestions of how to fix this?

Wayne League

Post by **Ron P.** » Sat Jun 10, 2006 10:35 pm

Hi Wayne, and welcome to the forums..

How long to you wait from the time you close and re-open PE? It seems that PE is not shutting down completely. Have you defragged your HDD recently? Keeping an orderly system helps programs run smoother, open and close faster and efficienlty.

Ron P.

wleague · Post by **wleague** » Sun Jun 11, 2006 4:12 am

Thanks for the reply, Ron.
Since I noticed the problem I've been trying to reopen the program immediately after closing most of the time. I'm running an AMD Athlon 64 which is normally very fast. A couple of times I went on to another program and came back 4 or 5 minutes later. The PEX process was still running.

I check the WinXP defrag routine every now ant then and it usually tells me that the C drive doesn't need defragmenting. That's what it said this time too, but I went ahead and defragged anyway . . . while waiting for the pex.exe process to maybe shut down . . . took about twenty minutes.
Afterward, Photo Explorer would open again.

But the same problem is still there after closing and trying to reopen again. So I decided to leave the task manager running on screen to see if the pex.exe process would shut down after while. Well, it did in about 15 minutes. This seems a bit excessive to me.

It is possible that Photo Explorer has been acting this way all the time and I just never needed to open it again in less than 15 minutes before. But I think it more likely that my WinXP is messed up somehow rather than a problem with Photo Explorer.

Thanks for lending an ear to my problem.

Wayne

Post by **Ron P.** » Sun Jun 11, 2006 4:28 am

Wayne,

I just ran a short test, using PE 8.6. I never had it take more then 6 secs to close, and Task Manager removed it accordingly.

I did notice that under the Preferences that PE seems to have a Cache and History, with the option to clear them. Have you tried clearing them?

Other then that, I agree that something on your system is messed up to where it is not allowing PE to close like it should.

Ron P.

wleague · Post by **wleague** » Mon Jun 12, 2006 3:00 pm

I've just discovered that this shutdown problem is somehow connected to another glitch that PE has been exhibiting ever since I started using WinXP. That is, when I delete a folder in PE, although the folder IS deleted, it still shows in the folder tree pane no matter what I try to get it to go away. The only way to get it out of the tree is to close PE and reopen it.

My new discovery is that if I delete a folder and then close PE, I can then reopen PE immediately and it works. (Closing PE without first deleting a folder makes PE unable to be opened again for 10 to 15 minutes, as stated in the previous posts above.)

Isn't that odd?? And since PE is the only program on my computer that does this, I'm suspecting that its code may have some guilt in this oddity.

Any of you gurus that may be out there are welcome to jump in here.

Wayne