tkin
Back to school!!
Prepare yourselves, cause you are about to hear one of the most horrific stories in your life, ok, may not that much, but still scared the daylights out of me 
So there I was, one fine morning, with a cup of coffee, browsing through usual 4chan cr@p(/b/), when all of a sudden my explorer(windows) hung, I thought WTF? This is a mean machine, with an updated OS, no virus, so what?
Anyway not to worry(I had full backup) I went to find a solution, restarted explorer, nothing, taskmanager showed 20% cpu utilization of explorer and it was stuck, felt weird, restart, same thing, now I was getting pi$$ed off, safe mode, nothing, now I felt concerned, since explorer was not accessible, I was accessing programs thorough task manager(run->browse)
So I went to find the issue, stopped all programs, nothing, killed all the context handlers, nothing, tried web, no proper solutions came, sfc/scannow, nothing, finally system restore, I felt safe, for 5 mins, it was back, now I was tired and wanted to give up
But then I started thinking WTH was I doing last, turned out I was using winrar to archive some files, small file, 60mb total, nothing lit up in my mind, without explorer the system was running absolutely ok, I could do anything, the system passed all hardware tests fine
SO??
ProcessExplorer revealed that the thread SHLWAPI.dll(under explorer process) was the issue, dump revealed nothing, google gave nothing. Killing the thread didn't fix it
And I was damn sure it wasn't a virus.
Right then I was about to give up and reinstall windows, when I accidentally clicked the Winrar's up button(Winrar was open as I was downloading a bunch of tools from web) and reached desktop, and I saw 24000 rar files on desktop, yes, 24k, so explorer was trying to display them, and fu(ked up
So I went to investigate the issue, found out that by default the segmentaion unit in WinRAR is B for bytes, yes bytes, I was trying to split the 60MB file into two parts, but instead I made 60000000/25 segments, windows crashed before we got there anyway, but 24k files was enough
What I did:
*i.imgur.com/0TGly.png
I deleted the files through winrar(they were not showing under any tools that used standard windows api to access files as those files were not visible under explorer,so I couldn't see them under task managers->run, browse menu), and it was fixed.
So guys, learn from my lesson, be careful with WinRAR, and you can use this method to screw your friends PC if you like, no long term damage, you could just erase the files with winrar or other non standard tools, or command prompt.
So there I was, one fine morning, with a cup of coffee, browsing through usual 4chan cr@p(/b/), when all of a sudden my explorer(windows) hung, I thought WTF? This is a mean machine, with an updated OS, no virus, so what?
Anyway not to worry(I had full backup) I went to find a solution, restarted explorer, nothing, taskmanager showed 20% cpu utilization of explorer and it was stuck, felt weird, restart, same thing, now I was getting pi$$ed off, safe mode, nothing, now I felt concerned, since explorer was not accessible, I was accessing programs thorough task manager(run->browse)
So I went to find the issue, stopped all programs, nothing, killed all the context handlers, nothing, tried web, no proper solutions came, sfc/scannow, nothing, finally system restore, I felt safe, for 5 mins, it was back, now I was tired and wanted to give up
But then I started thinking WTH was I doing last, turned out I was using winrar to archive some files, small file, 60mb total, nothing lit up in my mind, without explorer the system was running absolutely ok, I could do anything, the system passed all hardware tests fine
SO??
ProcessExplorer revealed that the thread SHLWAPI.dll(under explorer process) was the issue, dump revealed nothing, google gave nothing. Killing the thread didn't fix it
And I was damn sure it wasn't a virus.
Right then I was about to give up and reinstall windows, when I accidentally clicked the Winrar's up button(Winrar was open as I was downloading a bunch of tools from web) and reached desktop, and I saw 24000 rar files on desktop, yes, 24k, so explorer was trying to display them, and fu(ked up
So I went to investigate the issue, found out that by default the segmentaion unit in WinRAR is B for bytes, yes bytes, I was trying to split the 60MB file into two parts, but instead I made 60000000/25 segments, windows crashed before we got there anyway, but 24k files was enough
What I did:
*i.imgur.com/0TGly.png
I deleted the files through winrar(they were not showing under any tools that used standard windows api to access files as those files were not visible under explorer,so I couldn't see them under task managers->run, browse menu), and it was fixed.
So guys, learn from my lesson, be careful with WinRAR, and you can use this method to screw your friends PC if you like, no long term damage, you could just erase the files with winrar or other non standard tools, or command prompt.
