Windows 7 system tray preferences deleted (explorer.exe)

[gg45gsy8]

When running version 1.12 for Windows 7, at the start of the BleachBit process, the screen flashes blank (never noticed this before) and when the desktop reappears, the icons in the system tray have had their display preferences changed.

Sometimes all non-native display preferences are just reset. Other times, nothing happens. It seems to be easier to reproduce just after a reboot.

I've attached a screen recording of this happening. You can see the initial flash, and the system tray reappears with several icons missing.

In case you can't play wmv (I tried converting it but it lost the important bits) I've uploaded it to this non-public YouTube page: https://youtu.be/4TWUr6HwP2s

[ROCKNROLLKID (slinger1410-deactivatedaccount)]

The reset of explorer.exe comes from the setting Windows Explorer - Thumbnails. It was designed to do this in order to resolve a bug in BleachBit 1.10.

Please try unchecking this option and see if it resolves your issue.

[gg45gsy8 (fdc6b789)]

The bug seems to happen only some of the time when BB is run, but I just tried it several times with that option checked and unchecked, and the bug happened only while it was checked.

So it looks likely that this is the cause, but as I can't work out how to make it 100% repeatable, I can't say for sure.

[ROCKNROLLKID (slinger1410-deactivatedaccount)]

@Andrew: Is there a way you can make this so instead of forcing explorer.exe to restart, that you can just have the thumbnail cache deleted on system restart?

[Andrew Ziem (ahziem1)]

Thank you both

@ROCKNROLLKID: Yes, I will look into queuing these files for deletion, similar to what is done now for files that are locked by another process.

[Andrew Ziem (ahziem1)]

Other user has similar report: https://www.bleachbit.org/comment/2337

[Andrew Ziem (ahziem1)]

I have created a fix for this bug and released it. I tested it some on Windows XP, Windows 7, and Windows 10. The issue was that the explorer.exe process inherited the privileges of BleachBit, which often runs with escalated privileges, but explorer.exe typically runs with normal privileges.

Please visit http://ci.bleachbit.org and download build 1.13.370 or newer, and please reply here to let me know whether it fixed it on your system.

As cross reference, this seems to be the same issue
https://www.bleachbit.org/forum/bug-windows-explorer
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bleachbit/+bug/1606422

[Andrew Ziem (ahziem1)]

https://www.bleachbit.org/news/bleachbit-117-beta