How do I debug file access?

[daniel_m]

For a long time now, I see executables on my network drive sporadically disappear and reappear in XYplorer. Like, when I view a folder, an exe file is visible, but when I right-click it, it disappears. Changing to another folder and back, the exe is there again. The second time around, the exe won't disappear after right-clicking it. Even rebooting Windows won't make some executables disappear again. That makes reproducing this phenomenon impossible.

I don't think this is XYplorer's fault and suspect that Windows (10 Pro) is being weird here. Unfortunately, I can't see anything in the Windows event log. Exe files don't seem to disappear in Windows Explorer. Defender is (completely!) disabled. Additionally, this seems to affect GOG installers the most. I own these games and downloaded them directly from GOG. Therefore, they are 100% virus free. And for many games, the executable is tiny (<1MB), which makes me think that any additional interference from Windows shouldn't cause file access delays.
On the XYplorer side, there is nothing suspicious in the status log and debug log (I am running beta 27.00.0406). For some reason, "debuglogtofile 32;" doesn't do anything.

I tried to analyse file access with Sysinternals Process Monitor. But ... the amount of data it logs, even after excluding all irrelevant processes, is overwhelming ... and didn't show anything suspicious either.


So, is there any way to debug this situation? I'd need a tool or XYplorer log to analyse things in the background. Help

[highend]

And this happens with a fresh; instance as well?

Get
https://github.com/NickeManarin/ScreenToGif/releases

and capture this issue in a small .gif animation when using the fresh instance...

If they don't disappear in WE, it's unlikely that this is an OS issue...

[daniel_m]

Yes, it happens with "fresh;" too.

ScreenToGif is a very good suggestion ... that I tried before ... but ... I am really bad at remembering to use it any time something weird might happen

It might be a combination of XYplorer trying to get some meta information and Windows blocking access just a few nanoseconds too long for XYplorer to fail. That's what I'd love to see from some debug log or tool.

I'll post a GIF when (if?!) I manage to make one.

[daniel_m]

And just when I said it couldn't be done, I managed to capture a GIF:

2_.gif (30.59 KiB) Viewed 1342 times

The interesting part is the context menu. I guess that XYplorer fails to get the file information and therefore shows a default context menu instead. It's actually supposed to look like this:

Untitled.gif (11.39 KiB) Viewed 1347 times

[admin]

Very weird.

XY lists files as they are reported by Windows. If you turn off auto-refresh for network (Configuration | General | Refresh, Icons, History | Auto-Refresh | Include network locations) they should at least stop disappearing by themselves.

[daniel_m]

I turned off Auto-Refresh (Include network locations) for testing purposes, but that didn't help for some reason.

Here is a new GIF, showing that I managed to right-click an exe twice, and it disappearing after the third right click. Changing to another folder and back shows how the normal context menu works again, without the exe disappearing. (I removed personal information from the GIF, which resulted in an empty looking line. This is a file that XYplorer selected automatically when the exe disappeared.)

exe_.gif (105.18 KiB) Viewed 1296 times

I will continue testing ::fresh; and possibly different settings. This is a reproducibility nightmare ... but since I started this now, I guess I have to keep going ...