Thumbnails by LDView

[Travis Cobbs]

Hi all,

When I installed LDView I configured it to generate the thumbnails in Windows Explorer.
Lately when opening folders with LDraw files Explorer crashes almost every time.
How do I stop LDView from generating thumbnails?
This is getting very annoying (sorry about that Travis ;-)

Jaco

First of all, I cannot reproduce this problem in my fully updated 64-bit Windows 10. So, unfortunately, I'm not likely going to be able to track down and fix whatever is causing it. The thumbnail generator is actually quite simple, since it spawns an external instance of LDView.exe (or LDView64.exe) to do the actual work. But figuring out why it is crashing Explorer is well-nigh impossible without me being able to reproduce the crash.

Willy's instructions will uninstall, and regsvr32 can be used to turn off thumbnail generation manually without uninstalling. If you want to manually unregister (using regsvr32), you would do the following:

1. Hit the start button, then type 'cmd' (without the quotes).
   
2. Right click on "Command Prompt".
   
3. Select "Run as administrator"
   
4. Type 'cd "\Program Files\LDView"' (without the single quotes, but with the double quotes) and hit return.
   
5. Type 'regsvr32 /u LDViewThumbs.dll' (without the quotes) and hit return.
   
6. Hit OK to acknowledge that it successfully unregistered.
   
7. Type 'regsvr32 /u LDViewThumbs64.dll' (without the quotes) and hit return.
   
8. Hit OK to acknowledge that it successfully unregistered.
   
9. Reboot. (Possibly not necessary.)
   

If you have 32-bit Windows, skip steps 7 and 8. If you installed the 32-bit LDView in 64-bit Windows, the path in step 4 should be "\Program Files (x86)\LDView", but quite frankly you should uninstall the 32-bit LDView and then install the 64-bit one. I have tried both in my 64-bit Windows, and both appear to correctly generate thumbnails. Note that LDViewThumbs64.dll is installed in 64-bit Windows, whether you are installing the 32-bit LDView or the 64-bit one. (In fact, in 64-bit Windows, both DLLs are installed by both versions of LDView, because 32-bit programs can show thumbnails in their open and save dialogs.)

I would appreciate it if you used the AIOI if you would uninstall the whole AIOI and then install LDView standalone with Explorer thumbnails enabled. If they then work, then that probably indicates a problem in the AIOI (which doesn't use LDView's standalone installer). If it still crashes Explorer, then at least we know that the AIOI isn't the source of the problem. Note that I'm not expecting the AIOI to be the source of the problem; it's just one variable that is (relatively) easy to check.