Windows 7 Explorer hangs and Favorites, Libary and Computer animated magnifying glass icons animate forever

Hi James and everyone,

this issue has almost disappeared. I run into it now and then, but not anywhere as often as in the beginning. I forgot to mention one important thing that I discovered, a pattern:

It almost always aoccurred when an application was writing a lot to the harddisk, and the CPUs were running at full throttle. I have two SSD disks in RAID 0 for the operating system and program files. All my work is stored to another drive, which is two WD Raptors, also in RAID 0. I do multi media, and when "rendering" out image sequences, the CPUs are working very hard, and lots of files are written to the harddisk, several thousand.

My PC has the EVGA Classified SR2 mainboard, so it has two xeon CPUs working in parallel, which allows me to do a lot of other work, even if the video / 3D app is working at full speed. It is under these conditions that the issue happens. I can kill Explorer using task manager, and start it again, the applications run at full speed regardless, and are not influenced by restarting Explorer.

I have run this PC for more than one year, the issue is new, after the virus attack. But now, since the issue seems to have almost disappeared, I think I can say it is no real problem now anymore. But why it is almost gone - I have no idea. :)
Oh - I forgot to mention, I have installed several of the Windows updates that I am automatically notified about. Mabye these updates have fixed something..?