I write this up for information only and as an illustration of the difficulty of tracing, properly identifying and solving an initial issue highlighted by PD.

I bought an small 13" Asus i5 500Gb laptop with integrated graphics and dedicated GT520M 1Gb card, 1.6kg, 8hr battery, Win 7 professional 64 bit and a Mg/Al body for my 3 month diving trip to the philippines. It's a neat bit of kit for the purpose. I had loaded all the releases of PD8 and 9 on the HDD but had little time to fully explore my new toy before departing.

However, PD9 started to have an issue "importing" and "saving as" - it just crashed on the file handling window. Just what I wanted stuck on a small island 6/8hrs ferry and bus from any city. PD10 was unavailable and relatively new but I thought maybe that might solve the issue (when I get back !!)

It soon became obvious that it was actually windows explorer itself that was malfunctioning, making it virtually impossible (or at least a timeconsuming labour of love) to do any media file handling (including transferring from my cameras to the laptop). I stress the media file handling as this seemed to be the trigger, other forms of file handling seemed unaffected.

The internet on Malapascua is very intermittent and slow but googling showed windows explorer issues are legion - as are the potential solutions - particularly covering .mp4 and other media files. Endless possibilities for iffy CODECS, cleaning registries, thumbnails off, etc etc. All great but not advisable/didn't make a difference in my slightly remote location.

The use of sfc indicated a non repairable issue with some system files. So looks like a major problem. I have a recovery partition but not much in the way of access to other programmes to reload.

Other than this the system was fine, so I suffered on, sometimes taking an hour to download my dive clips from the camera card to the laptop and then to the backup drive, often going off to search and use someone else's computer in one of the bars - yeah, it's an excuse, I know.

A Swedish fellow traveller pointed me towards Total Commander which runs outside the main explorer shell and my main file handling problems were solved - but not those that still used the explorer shell, PD being one of them - so little video editing done.

On my return I installed PD10 to test but, as expected no difference, I reinstalled the system from scratch, and, lo!, the problem was still there even on a relatively clean install.

More time spent on google, more time viewing windows error event logs, came across the ASUSWSShellExt64.dll entry more often than seemed good. This forms part of the ASUS webstorage software system.

Uninstalled the offending software (one of the pre-loaded, unknown but maybe look at later/whenever items) and the problem has apparently gone away.

Interesting how a fundamental and intrinsic part of the windows system can apparently be made to malfunction so badly by another bit of software offered and pre-loaded by a major manufacturer.
Make of it what you will.
Cheers
Adrian

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated. (see below)
Confucius
AMD Phenom IIX6 1055T, win10, 5 internal drives, 7 usb drives, struggling power supply.