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Arranging invisible icons in quadratic time (2021)
Near the end of January I was pointed to a twitter thread where a Windows user with a powerful machine was hitting random hangs in explorer. Lots of unscientific theories were being proposed. I don…
I don’t have access to this source code but I looked through the stacks for a bit and they seemed to suggest that explorer.exe was spending more than 20 seconds doing a lot of tasks related to… arranging icon positions. So, 20 seconds arranging icons didn’t seem plausible and I assumed that the root cause would be some weird shell extension or other third-party software, but eventually I tried to reproduce the bug in the simplest way possible. The original bug seemed to be related to rearranging multi-monitor setups (a job hazard for streamers, so I’m told) so for a while I was testing by plugging and unplugging my external monitor.
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