26th March 2002

I put my hand upon your hip. When I zip, you zip, we zip. Except for Lockergnomie Mark Harmon. He's been pretty annoyed with Windows XP's built-in ZIP file management. Why? As he so eloquently puts it: "I've been having problems with Windows XP's Search feature from day one. When I search, it starts the process, seems to pause for a while, then resumes. Searches seem to take forever; while it's 'paused,' all of my CPU cycles seem to go to the search. Windows seems to be (temporarily) locked up. Well, after thinking about it, I decided to disable Windows XP's ZIP file integration and - lo and behold - Windows once again searches the way other versions did. On the Run command line in the Start Menu, enter: 'regsvr32 %windir%\ system32\ zipfldr.dll /u' (sans quotes or spaces between the backslashes). To reinstall the functionality, repeat the process without the '/u' switch. I was pulling my hair out over this." Me too! Perhaps in a future OS revision, they'll allow us to deselect the automatic compressed archive Search feature. Until then, I might suggest storing all non-essential ZIP files on a separate drive (or system).