I had the worst problem from about 2 hours ago on June 17th all the way to September. That's about 9 months. And I would look into it here and there but yesterday and today I finally cracked down and went through about 70 threads from google searching about this stupid thumbnail problem.
I realized yesterday that mine started back when my dad wanted me to burn him something using a Nero copy he had. So I put it into my computer and installed it & after that everything just messed up. I obviously got angry and uninstalled it right away. But since that point onwards my Vista was never quite the same again. Whenever I opened up a folder in explorer it would load extra slow.. and in the address bar the Green loading strip (whatever you call it) would take forever to load and then it would never complete loading. So the green strip would just keep going. It was extremely annoying.
The worst part of course of this whole debacle was the fact that some of my movie files (.avi,.mpeg..etc.) would randomly not have thumbnails in thumbnail view. Same goes for my picture files (.jpeg,.bmp..etc.). I'm not saying they were all lacking thumbnails but a good 80-90% were without them. In September the percentage lacking had only been around 20% but after reading forums and trying out stuff like "removing the thumbnail cache" it just got worse because not only did it remove the thumbnail cache, after that Vista just didn't redo the thumbnails and just kept 80% erased.
Now this was obviously so annoying for me especially since I have a lot of pictures on my computer from facebook/wallpapers/photoshop/etc.. and movies as well. Going through thousands of pictures without thumbnails is insane. So I finally decided to try and solve this issue again yesterday night. After googling tons and tons I kept coming across threads that would say simply go to folder options and unclick the "don't show thumbnails" option. Then others said go to command prompt and do an svc scan or something like that. Another said clear the thumbnail cache. One more said make the default program for all these picture files "Windows Photo Gallery" which mine already were. And it said for the movie types make the default "Windows Media Player" ...So I did all of this. Nothing worked.
Then I remembered Nero causing the initial problem so I looked that up on google... turns out a lot of ppl have that problem. Nero is horrible for Vista I guess, and I still couldn't find a great solution. I tried one that said to re-install Nero and then use their Clean-up file on their website to uninstall it from the computer. I did that, it took forever of course and I restarted the computer to no avail. It was still messed up and I was losing hope. Then I went to sleep almost giving up (more because I was just too tired to deal with this non-sense).
When I woke up I started searching even more google links, changing up my search words and going up to page 12 at least each time. I found another thread which told me to update my registry with all these registry files updating all file associations back to their default state. So I downloaded them all and updated the registry. I restarted the computer and still nothing. I really thought that it was going to work. Hope seemed low. (Here's the link for File association registry files:
File association fixes for Windows Vista )
Then I had a breakthrough where I thought maybe it was because of the codecs from Nero. So I started searching for codec fixes and still couldn't find anything helpful. They told me to delete some files in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Ahead\DSFilter\ .. they said that the files with the .ax extension were the problem. I tried deleting them but said they were in use and I couldn't delete them. So then I kept searching google more and found a great thread finally after all this time. It had a link to a program which you could open to see all the codecs on your computer and you could use it to disable whichever one's you wanted. (Here's the link for the program called InstalledCodec:
Disable/enable codec drivers and DirectShow filters installed on your system )
So I downloaded the program and saw lots of codecs on it. It had an option to sort by the date Installed/Modified. So I sorted it and saw only about 3-4 actual dates where all these were from. The first group was from when I bought my computer in '08. Then the second group was Sept '09 when the Nero problem happened. There were about 29 codecs from Nero that were shown there. 27 of them were already disabled because of the uninstall I assume. Might be different for you however so you can just check it out yourself The other two still enabled however were called "Nero Video Decoder" and "Nero DVD Decoder". I clicked all 29 and right clicked and Disabled them all. Then I closed the program and restarted my computer.
Now when I opened up my picture and movie folders at first it seemed like nothing had worked. However I waited 20 seconds and everything started showing up. Vista was finally loading my thumbnails for everything perfectly! FINALLY EVERYTHING WORKS! So happy now and I figured I'd at least write this out in case anyone has the same problem and this helps them out...
If you have any questions about anything I said in this post just e-mail me incase I never come back to this site again... of course after you e-mail me I'm sure I'll come back to clarify but I think I explained what happened to me pretty clearly so hopefully everything just works out well for anyone else with this problem...
Good luck!
-Jaymit
Email:
[email protected]
PS: Maybe a combination of all the things I did is what made it work. Like the file association thing in combination with deleting the thumbnail cache in combination with making the default programs the windows ones and also of course the last part about the codecs. So if the codec fix alone doesn't help, try everything else as well... I mean if I were you I'd just do the other things first and do the codec last. That way you have the most chance to succeed. And don't forget to restart your computer.
PPS: I also just found a website with Vista Codec Packs... I don't know if they would actually help but if nothing works maybe give it a try or at least check out the page:
http://www.softpedia.com/progChangelog/Advanced-Vista-Codec-Package-Changelog-55586.html
