I am running windows 8 pro and every since I install the OS the one issue I have constantly had is the so called GREEN RIBBON OF DEATH. When I open the file explorer (windows explorer) like my computer, the drives and folders will not load completely but will continue to load with the green bar on the address bar continuously loading. This is so frustrating.

I have heard of this problem with windows vista and some windows 7 but I have never experienced it for all the years I used vista and windows 7. Unfortunately, ever since I install windows 8, this problem will not go away. It happens so often and restarting explorer.exe does not fix it. I will have to restart my computer for it me to browse my drives and folders using file explorer and after awhile the GREEN RIBBON OF DEATH will start happening again.

I have done a complete fresh install with very few of my software installed on the OS but I still have this problem.

Is anyone else having this problem with windows 8 and if so, it there any help out there.

SYSTEM INFO: WIN 8 Pro, 8GB Ram, 3:20GHz AMD Processor, 640GB Hard drive.

• Edited by Nayogod Saturday, October 27, 2012 2:41 PM

Hi,

Please try the following:

1. Disable all startup items and non-Microsoft services to see if it works.
2. Disconnect or disable the unnecessary storage devices, such as USB disk and try again.

Thanks for your suggestion Nicolas; I will try what you suggested when my power is restored. Right now I do not have power because of Hurricane Sandy. However, I was still having this GREEN RIBBON OF DEATH after I did a fresh OS install and had almost no program installed on the OS. So I don't think disabling all startup items and non-Microsoft services might be the solutions.

I did this but I was not able to really see it works before Hurricane Sandy and I have not had power since then. But shouldn't I be able to view icons and folders in thumbnails. I never had any problems with this on my windows 7.

Hi,

Please check the disks with Chkdsk command:

Chkdsk

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc730714(v=ws.10).aspx

In addition, please refer to the methods in the following post to check the dump file:

SHL: Windows Explorer - Hang / Crash

http://blogs.technet.com/b/askperf/archive/2009/04/13/shl-windows-explorer-hang-crash.aspx

Nicholas,

I ran Chkdsk on the drives on my pc and the check came back okay. There were no issues with my drives so I don't think this is the issue.

Andre,

I do have ProcessExplorer running but can you explain more on how to achieve the process you mentioned. How do I stop the logging and the filter to see the operations that is so slow?

sorry, I meant ProcessMonitor.

Process Montitor is explained here:

Defrag Tools: #4 - Process Monitor - Examples

Watch both shows and filter that only explorer is shown and look at the duration column to see which operations are slow.

I think I might have figured out the course of my problem. I have three internal hard drives that are connected to my computer and all three drives are in perfect condition according to chkdsk. One of the drives is the energy saver or environment friendly drives that supposedly goes to sleep when it is not in use to save power (at least that was what the packaging said). I realized that 8 out of 10 times when I experience this green ribbon of death will be when I access this energy saver drive.

Just to further confirm this, I uninstalled this drive and I have been running my computer now for three days without experiencing this very annoying green ribbon of death.

But if this problem was actually caused by this energy saver drive, then it is either that window 8 have issues with energy saver drives or that it does not have the patience to wait for the drive to wake up and start running. My windows xp and windows 7 never had any issues with it.

Again I am not saying that I am 100% sure that this is the root cause of my green ribbon of death because I am still monitoring my pc but for the first time since I started running windows 8, I was able to use it for more than a day without restarting it because of this green ribbon of

I think I might have figured out the course of my problem. I have three internal hard drives that are connected to my computer and all three drives are in perfect condition according to chkdsk. One of the drives is the energy saver or environment friendly drives that supposedly goes to sleep when it is not in use to save power (at least that was what the packaging said). I realized that 8 out of 10 times when I experience this green ribbon of death will be when I access this energy saver drive.

Okay, so after I have removed the green hard drive, I did noticed that I no longer have this problem like I use to but I however still experience the green ribbon of death like once or twice in two or three days. This made me to think, though the green hard drive might have contributed to my problem, it is not the root cause of the problem.

After I carefully monitored my PC for some days, I was able to figure out what causes this Green Ribbon of Death (GROD). DLLHOST.EXE. I noticed that whenever the GROD occurs and the explorer goes into its never ending loading, the DLLHOST.EXE application will be running on the task manager and the CPU usage will be a little bit high. I also noticed that once I kill the DLLHOST.EXE application, the explorer will immediately load completely and everything will start running normally again until the application starts running again.

From what I understand, DLLHOST.EXE application is a Microsoft COM Surrogate DLL and needs to run for security and stability purposes. I know that this application is not corrupt or infected because I have had this GROD even when I had done a clean install of Windows.

Any suggestion on what will make DLLHOST.EXE application to be causing this green ribbon of death.

Andre

You might be right about the thumbnail creation but disabling this function is not really what I will like to do because this is a function that I like to use. I never had this as a problem on my previous versions of windows. I think there should to be a better solution to this than disabling a function that shouldn't necessarily be disabled.

I think there should to be a better solution to this than disabling a function that shouldn't necessarily be

In Windows 8 thumbnails are enabled by default, so if you have a lot of photos in say your downloads folder, then it will take a while to open the folder because a lot of thumbnails are being generated. To turn off thumbnails follow the procedure below.

This procedure disables thumbnails on all folders:

1. Open Windows Explorer
2. On the right of the tools bar ribbon click the "Options" button not the down arrow on the options button
3. Click the View Tab
4. Check "Always Show Icons Never Thumbnails"
5. Click "Apply to Folders"

This procedure will change the thumbnail creation behavior for all folders. As you say thumbnails are a nice feature so you probably don't want to turn it off completely, but you should probably only have it turned on in the Pictures folder.

To turn on the thumbnails only in the Pictures folder follow these steps:

1. Open Windows Explorer and Navigate to the Pictures folder
2. On the right of the tools bar ribbon click the "Options" button not the down arrow on the options button
3. Click the View Tab
4. Clear the checkbox near "Always Show Icons Never Thumbnails"

This time, do not click Apply to Folders, and the setting will only be on in the Pictures Folder.

• Proposed as answer by Wolverine58 Sunday, July 14, 2013 3:30 PM
• Edited by Wolverine58 Sunday, July 14, 2013 3:51 PM Left out a sentence
• Marked as answer by Brandon RecordsModerator Friday, January 17, 2014 4:48 PM

That was not the answer  in my case, which is like that of others i saw, and the quick answer was  to find an XP PC.

I have "Always show icons, never thumbnails" checked, but i   plugged in an 320gb sata drive using a USB adapter cable,  and after about 10 seconds   Windows 8.1 proceeded to search the drive, showing the green ribbon, evidently doing what the Autoplay would do in XP, but under  that OS   i could cancel the Autoplay search and get right to the  files.

But in Windows 8.1 i let it try to get  whatever info it wanted, which it did  very slowly, even though this PC has a ASRock 970 EXTREME3 mobo; AMD 6350 3.9ghz 6 core 64bit cpu; 8gb ram, and i  had just rebooted.

Finally i cancelled the ribbon, but which rendered explorer inoperable. It was still running, as Process Explorer showed, and restarting explorer.exe   did not help. No taskbar, no window explorer (Win key and e), thus requiring a reboot (for which used the power.exe utility, which i have hotkeyed.)

When i rebooted, i saw the Taskbar had moved to the side, combining it with the  Start menu (I use Classic Shell). I dragged it back but then it was missing my Quick Launch bar i had added.

Then i plugged in the sata drive with the USB adapter cable, but it did not show up in Windows Explorer, and froze the Drive manager until i unplugged the drive.

So i got an old Toshiba Travelmate 2480 (1.6-GHz Intel Celeron M), and it quickly recognized the drive, began the autoplay which i stopped, and i then opened the drive. And did a quick format of a partition.

I had a similar problem with a new Team Color Turn 16GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive (Green), which W/8 was slow to recognize, and then said    was write protected, and  yet could not a full format  to remove alleged write protection, even under Device Manager.   But which the same XP laptop quickly recognized, and formatted.  Now it works fine in W/8. Thank God for alternatives.

• Edited by PBY777 Saturday, January 11, 2014 9:37 PM

hey guys, unfortunately, i work with graphics all day, every day, so working without thumbnails would be super painful. btw, i get GROD in directories with only one JPG, so it's not how many.

i have windows 8.1 on an SSD in a new Lenovo desktop, and these green ribbons of death are killing me. even if i switch off thumbnails, i need previews, and the Preview Pane often just states "No preview available." sometimes the pane sticks on one preview, regardless of other files being selected.

especially frustrating, i can't preview PDFs any more for some reason. related?

i've tried the solutions suggested on various forums to no avail. could be related to the second drive installed in this machine, but if so, might be unfixable i guess.

• Edited by davidicus Monday, July 14, 2014 6:18 PM

I'm just curious as to why this issue has never been fully resolved since it's inception in Windows Vista.  Either case, I believe the symptoms described and resolution can be found via the following links...the batch files described in the "resolution" link may need to be tweaked for Win 8 and 8.1.  I do not code, I just execute and cross my fingers. :)

Description
http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/454342-windows-explorer-green-ribbon-of-death

Resolution?
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/15699-folder-template-default.html

• Edited by Luis Lamberty Monday, September 15, 2014 11:42 PM

We are having lots of users with this issue currently.  Most of ours are on win7 and experiencing the magnifying glass over the "favorites", "libraries" and "Computer" in the left pane.  Nothing shows in the main pane.  I was able to find some tweaks to launch windows explorer in a different mode:

%windir%\explorer.exe ::{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}

Adding that to the target path for the explorer launcher got us fixed for the moment. I do realize our issue is for win7 but I am having trouble getting help on this problem and this is one of the few posts that actually has 2014 comments. These issues seem to have all started after a recent windows update for a Russian Time Zone change. I have tried removing that update and it doesn't fix the issue. Hopefully someone will see this and have some new info for me.

An open letter to Microsoft:

I see reports of the "green bar of slowness" occurring in Windows 7 and Windows 8 all over the various technical blogs with posting dates going back many years.   All sorts of guesses are suggested as silly work-arounds.   I have tried most of the saner ideas, and I still have the problem on new Windows 7 computers with the latest Microsoft updates.

By this date Windows 7 should be a well-debugged OS.    Why is "green bar of slowness" a problem that the user must wrestle with?    Why has not Microsoft fixed this problem?   Does any developer at Microsoft read these tech forums?  

If Microsoft can't fix the problem, then the Windows should display this message Windows is executing a needless, time-consuming task.   Click here to cancel this process and get on with your work.

If anyone from Microsoft reads this, please forward this to the responsible persons to take action.   Thank you.

Respectfully submitted,

The most common problem for the "This PC" delays is networking. A network drive that was once connected is not present.

If you boot your PC with the network cable disconnected, then the "This PC" will open instantly if you have this issue.

This is because when you start your PC with networking enabled the "This PC" shortcut execution shows you a dialog with all of your drives and other system elements. It also invokes a parsing agent that looks for all those previous network locations to "fire them up" and "prepare them" for your viewing pleasure.

You most likely have this delay caused from orphaned network locations if when you start your "This PC" it first shows a few icons then after a few seconds, waits and then shows a status bar. At the same time the status bar starts, the "Items count" appears. This is the local "This PC" telling you how many items there are and that it is done opening the "This PC" window. This is where the bug comes in. Now it is going to have a status bar while it tries to connect up to all those previous network locations. The rest of the time it is networking and parsing to find those previous network locations.

I have not found a way to turn this parsing off yet. I am still looking. My PC did not do this until I used it for 3 weeks and discovered some network locations. Turning on and off sharing and network discovery does not seem to change "This PC" network parsing and discovery issues.

If I restart my computer with the network cable unplugged I don't get the GROD until such time as I access my first network drive.

I also had this problem - for me it was fixed by:

Tools > Folder Options > General > (Navigation Pane)

UNcheck: "Show all folders"

UNcheck: "Automatically expand to current folder"

[edit: actually success was short lived :-(]

• Proposed as answer by SBohlken 2 hours 16 minutes ago
• Edited by SBohlken 42 minutes ago NQR
• Unproposed as answer by SBohlken 42 minutes ago