One of the most annoying things about managing files in Windows is managing media files such as photos and videos.  Windows in all it’s ‘helpfulness’ constantly tries to categorize and create thumbnail icons for all your media files.  The irritating part of this is that it’s constantly doing it – even while you’re trying to move the files or folders in question.  In fact, it seems to ALWAYS be doing this even if it’s already gotten icons for it.  Every directory you select immediately triggers Windows to start categorizing the directory.  So when you try to move the folders in question – you get a never-ending stream of ‘File in use’ errors and you can’t get anything done.

Even better is the fact Windows doesn’t tell you WHICH file(s) are in use (thumbs.db), by whom (Windows itself), nor give you any way to figure it out.  One of the cardinal rules of error dialogs is that they must give you enough information to fix the problem – or you’re wasting everyone’s time and have designed something completely useless for the user.  This fails that test miserably.

What would have been infinitely better is if Windows had the smarts to know IT is the one preventing the folder from being moved and stop doing it for the 2 seconds it needs to move the directory and then start over again.  But we don’t get that intelligence at all.

Instead, do this:

Start Menu-> Edit Group Policy

Select:

User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Explorer
The setting you want: “Turns off the caching of thumbnails in hidden thumbs.db files.”