Like many of you, I keep a LOT of pictures on my hard drive. Also,
like many of you, I use Adobe Photoshop to crop and enhance my photos.

I have had an infuriating problem with Windows Explorer (in Win XP,
both Home and Professional) crashing instantly and utterly when trying
to open a folder with many .jpg picture files in it. It wouldn't do it
all the time, but when it did, it was always fatal -- there was no
warning, and no work-around.

I eventually found that I could use DOS (remember DOS?) to copy the
files into a new folder, higher "upstream" in the directory tree, which
would allow it to work without crashing. (In the C:/ root directory,
for example, rather than buried down in C:\family photos\las vegas)

This was a giant pain in the tooska, however, as using DOS commands to
copy files from a folder that is 10 levels deep in a directory tree is
an exercise in frustration. One wrong character, and *bzzzzt!*, it
ain't gonna work.

Microsoft has been strangely silent on this problem, much to my dismay.
Luckily, today I FINALLY found the solution. The glitch has to do
with the icons that are used in Explorer to denote a picture file, and
(in turn) it's also directly related to having Photoshop set up as your
default picture viewer. Further, it also is directly related to having
folder names that are longer than 10 characters long -- something XP
can handle, but (apparently) Photoshop cannot.

SO, long story short, there are now TWO work-arounds to this problem:

1. Uninstall Photoshop, and reinstall it without making it the default
picture file viewer for .jpg flies. This allows you to still use long
folder names.

2. Leave Photoshop as is, but be sure to keep your file names to 10 or
fewer characters in length.

I have chosen the latter course, for now, and it works.

Why the heck Microsoft or Adobe couldn't simply announce this
problem/fix is beyond me -- it's been a hot topic of discussion all
over the 'net, and most people with XP and Photoshop have experienced
it at times. It took a generous computer sleuth to figure out the
solution, through trial and error, and post it online.
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"