Hi Jorge. I know this topic has been talked about before. However, because technology has improved, and you're obviously working on new Winstep versions, mostly due to Windows 11, I'm hoping that you can fix the issue.

I and many users still have 10 and will not be changing anytime soon unless there are drastic changes.

So here's the issue. Even though I have a pretty high-end setup with an SSD drive, WorkShelf, docks, and sub docks will pause (making them unusable) for at least 2 mins if I haven't used them for a long period of time. It happens even without the PC going to sleep.

I came up with a workaround and then thought that it might help you in figuring out how to get rid of the issue.

When the docks and WorkShelf pause, I access the programs I want via the Start menu. Using this method allows me to immediately open my frequently used programs after clicking on the Start button.

BTW, I have Classic Shell installed.

Never saw that problem here, on a not very state of the art i7 quad laptop (moving Win 10 to an older i5 dual core RSN, I hope. I have scrolling text in one of the modules, and that gets painfully slow after a sleep period, and other modules then also tend to update rather slowly, e.g. the CPU, RAM, and NET etc. mods, but that's as far as it goes. (And Win sleep mode tends to do funny stuff to other apps as well. Real PITA.)

In hindsight, I should have been more precise. The issue only happens when I click on either WorkShelf, or a Control Icon on the dock to access my sub dock.

It doesn't happen if I click on other items such as a folder or drive icon on the dock. I'm confused as to why this happens. It would appear that it should do it on the folder and drive icons as well.

Another thing is that sometimes I can cycle WorkShelf, but if I click on the icon for the program Everything, it always works. However, if I click on the other icons I frequently use, then the pause/temporary lockup always happens.

Sounds like you have a hard disk or something configured to go to sleep after <x> minutes of activity that is extremely slow to spin up again (or has a hardware problem), and your sub-dock has shortcut(s) pointing to that drive.

Don't see any reason other than that.

Jorge, apparently you've pinpointed the issue. I unplugged all 10 of the external hard drives and HDMI cable running to the TV. I shut down and restarted the PC a few times.

I cycled like mad back and forth through WorkShelf, then clicked on the Control Icon containing the sub-dock, rapidly cycled back and forth through that trying to duplicate the lockup/pause. No lockup.

I then plugged in all external drives and the HDMI cable that connects to my TV. The PC was on.

After that, I clicked on WorkShelf and the pause happened, but it only lasted 20 seconds. However, I didn't wait for several hours to let the PC go to sleep, or use the PC for several hours before using WorkShelf or the sub-dock.

I've noticed something that I hope someone here can explain. I recently had my liquid cooler replaced because it died.

I go days without shutting off my PC. Eventually, the CPU temperature will rise at least 10 degrees, and the PC performance will slow down.

Shutting down the PC every day helps for a couple of days longer. After going through the unplug, shutdown, and replug process, the CPU temperature drops at least 10 degrees, and the PC performance returns to normal.

It appears that I’ve finally resolved the issue. So to recap, here’s the explanation of what the problem was, and the procedures I went through to solve the problem.

When I would click on the Control Icon on the dock which has a subdock, most of the time, particularly after the PC wasn’t used for 15 mins or more, Winstep would totally lockup.

The only way to unlock it was to use the task manager and kill it. In the task manager, it was easy to find because it showed the process Com Surrogate in red.

The next step was to go to the file location which is C:\Windows\SysWOW64.

After much research, I used Process Explorer https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysint ... s-explorer to track down what was causing the problem. After opening it, I clicked on View, clicked on Show Lower Pane, then find dllhost.exe and clicked on it.

When I clicked on it, it pointed to the following Winstep dlls in the lower pane.

C:\Windows\SysWOW64\msvbvm50.dll and C:\Windows\SysWOW64\en-US\user32.dll.mui.

As I continued scrolling through the lower pane, I found the culprit! It was a video. I killed the process in task manager first, then deleted it. So far, the problem hasn’t returned in the past 2 days.

Here’s the video I found that I used to solve the problem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIy7BMiEi5M

For some reason, the video latched onto the Winstep dlls and locked up the program due to trying to generate a thumbnail. The reason it always did it when accessing the subdock was that the video was located in one of the folders that’s on the subdock.

This is a good example on how 3rd party code can affect a Winstep application. The generation of thumbnails is made by 3rd party code, all the Winstep application does is ask Windows to give it a thumbnail of a specific document/image file.