FolderThumbnailFix

Hmmm, so what could be holding imageres.dll.mun open, even in safe mode? There are various tools, such as handle.exe, that may help track down what process has a handle to that file. AI, such as ChatGPT can give you more details with a prompt along the lines of "List some Windows tools that will help me find out what program or process has a handle to imageres.dll.mun". That's all I can think of to try at this point.

LesFerch said:

Hmmm, so what could be holding imageres.dll.mun open, even in safe mode?

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My experience is the mun files are locked by Explorer, so you're supposed do the "rename an opened file in place" dance.

garlin said:

My experience is the mun files are locked by Explorer, so you're supposed do the "rename an opened file in place" dance.

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That being the case, maybe the solution is to run FolderThumbnailFix while booted into safe mode with command line only (option 6)?

LesFerch said:

That being the case, maybe the solution is to run FolderThumbnailFix while booted into safe mode with command line only?

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What would be the CLI command to run FolderThumbnailFix?

ITK1000 said:

What would be the CLI command to run FolderThumbnailFix?

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You can simply run FolderThumbnailFix and the interface will still come up. Or you can use the command FolderThumbnailFix /install.

LesFerch said:

You can simply run FolderThumbnailFix and the interface will still come up. Or you can use the command FolderThumbnailFix /install.

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Using the command line in safe mode worked. I finally got rid of the folder flap. Thank you.

ITK1000 said:

Using the command line in safe mode worked. I finally got rid of the folder flap. Thank you.

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Awesome! I'll update the documentation with that recommendation. Thanks to @garlin.

FolderThumbNailFix kills explorer.exe and waits a full second before trying to update imageres.dll.mun, so this result seems to indicate that killing explorer.exe (and waiting) doesn't necessarily free up all of its file handles. Hmmm.

I solved a similar problem in the first version of my RestoreGameExplorer script:

When you run a machine executable file, Windows locks the file while the process is running.

That's because Windows is trying to be efficient and memory maps the process's code pages against the on-disk copy. If Windows had to page out this process, it doesn't have to write the in-memory pages for the code segment to a paging file. Instead it can throw them away, and reload the missing code back into memory by reading the disk file.

This is why if you ever manage to overwrite a running process's disk file, Windows or Linux will raise an exception and crash the process.

I imagine in Safe Mode, Explorer isn't running the full set of features.

But you can switch executables or DLL's on a live system, by renaming the current file (so Windows can keep its existing file handles). After the file switch has been completed, you can kill/restart the process so it releases the old file handles and restarts using the replacement DLL which now has the same filename.

Sounds good. When I get a chance, I'll try updating the code to use that method. Thanks!

LesFerch said:

Sounds good. When I get a chance, I'll try updating the code to use that method. Thanks!

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@garlin @ITK1000 Version 1.0.8 (now available) uses the "rename dance" method to update the file. Hopefully this eliminates the need to run the tool in Safe Mode.