Reported Thumbnail window freezes 15 seconds / before loading anything

[schrotti]

Hi,
I’m a big fan of Irfanview and using it to organize my images since several years on various computers based on windows. But recently I discovered a problem. I set up a new 12-core AMD Ryzen computer, with m.2 SSD + 32GB RAM and so on, running the latest Windows 10 Pro (version 20H2).
Opening Irfanview (directly or by double clicking an image) is very fast and without any delay. But when I press T to switch to thumbnail view, the program freezes for 15 seconds and then starts loading the images. (Task manages says the app is not responding during that time)
This is a very strange behavior, that I have never experienced on any of my weaker intel machines before. It is the same behavior when I directly open thumbnail view. No other software of mine is showing that behavior.

I tried IrfanView 4.56 and 4.53. (64-bit + 32-bit portable)
I tried disabling all plugins, windows compatibility mode, disabling defender antivirus, different folders, different hard drives … but all leads to the same behavior.

I hope you guys have any hints what is causing this. Is there a debug or error log option?

My system infos:
Windows 10 Pro (version 20h2) 64-bit

AMD Ryzen 3900x
MSI Tomahawk X570 Motherboard
m.2 SSD Samsung 970 Evo Plus
Crucial Ballistix 32 GB RAM (3200 Mhz)
GPU: Asus RTX 2070 Super

No error message is shown.
All files or folders cause this problem.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

I don't have any suggestions to offer. There is a delay of a second or two on my much slower single-core AMD system.

Specs: AMD A10-6800K, 8 Gb (WinSPRLevel = 5.9) on Win 10 64-bit 2004 build 19041.572

[JendaLinda]

My guess is it could be something when loading folders in the tree view. The program is trying to list disk drives and user folders. Maybe it's hanging on something there.

[schrotti]

After some research, I started IrfanView specifically as Administrator (even though my user account is an Administrator too) and when i do this, it doesn't produce the delay (or freeze). Why is that? Starting that way is quite annoying, because i always get the UAC warning first, and i have to confirm it too. (Changing the security settings isn't the best workaround either)
Any hints or explanations for this? Thanks a lot.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

I am also using an Admin account. I think Irfan Skiljan is the one best placed to offer a solution to this. Please send him a bug report and let us know the results. See Help, About IrfanView for his email address.

[Silvernerd1]

Hi Irfanview-Users,

this is my first posting here and a good time to say "Hello everyone ???"

I had the same problem, and the reason was, that unavailable windows shares were mapped to drive letters. E.g. I have a NAS that I mapped to drive letter N: When NAS is on, Irfanview Thumbnails starts fast. When NAS is off, Thumbnails need 15 sec. to come up.

My assumption: IView Thumbnals checks all drive letters on startup, and if a drive letter is defined, but not available, it waits until a timeout occurs.

After disconnecting all unavailable drive letters, IView Thumbnails always appears fast.

Bfn
Michael

[JendaLinda]

Thank you for sharing your findings.

[fotonut]

I have 4 such drives of which only 1 is connected and depending on which VPN I sign into. In other words, this moment I may have an active R drive and next hour I may have an active S drive This does not work for me. It takes me between 2-3 minutes waiting on thumbnails to load. The author of the program needs to find some system API call that does not time out waiting for the drive to respond. Minimally, add another configuration panel where the active drive to be scanned can be listed, assuming there is no API system call to discover drives without this time delay.

I was just trying to remember how many years I have been dealing with this issue and come to think of it, it was about the same time that I began adding virtual drives once I started using OpenVPN to log into remote routers with Samba shares.\

[JendaLinda]

Have anybody asked the developer, if this inconvenience can be resolved?