Word of warning! OpenShell is the continuation of Classic Shell, which I know has a few fans around here.

I just did a quick memory upgrade to my Win7 box, which I've had OpenShell installed on for just a few days. I booted it up with the new RAM and was dismayed to find “Explorer” failing to start properly. The loading wheel stayed on permanently and clicking on the start menu brought up the “explorer is not responding to the system” dialog.

I brought up Task Manager and saw it essentially gobble up ALL my fresh new RAM, and then start thrashing the hard drive as it hit the swap file hard. I rebooted a few times to the same result. Safe mode booted up fine, but a normal boot would do this every time.

“Explorer” is written in quotes here, because that’s what Windows reported was using all the RAM, but I was already pretty suspicious it was something else’s fault.

At this point I was wondering if I’d picked up a coin miner or ransomware that was encrypting my files somewhere. So I booted Linux and used a file explorer to look for the biggest new files on the drive. And look what I found:

Yep, Openshell had created a 13GB temp file and a 1.4GB application cache file. It was growing them continuously but it would reset if you restarted Explorer through the task manager or rebooted.

It turns out this bug was reported (by one of our own members) back in October and apparently hasn’t been fixed or even confirmed by the dev team yet. Well, it’s definitely a thing. Interestingly OpenShell was running fine for a couple days and this only started happening after I upgraded the RAM. I did notice it never seemed to have folder or program icons though.

Anyway, now I’m waiting for rsync to finish backing up the Windows HDD from within Linux just in case, and then I’m gonna have to expunge OpenShell manually since add/remove programs doesn’t want to do it in safe mode. Fun times.

Note: this post is in no way trying to deride or rag on the OpenShell team, who I’m sure are doing the best they can for a free app. Writing software is hard! Especially while trying to interface with and extend the byzantine & poorly documented Windows native subsystems. I’m just posting this as a warning to you guys, since this is a really serious bug that doesn’t seem widely known, which could hose your system or lead to data loss. Hopefully they’ll get this fixed in short order, but until then, proceed with MUCH caution.