Why does XP crash when I view thumbnails in open dialogs?
Thumbnail rendering is handled by shell extensions, which can be written by third-parties. It’s possible that in the past you’ve installed some buggy software that has taken over the shell extension and is hanging or crashing. This is *much* more common with video than photos, though. If you ever installed some “super-duper codec pack” from the internet, it might include one of those buggy extensions. I don’t know your technical level of expertise with computers, but if you can install the free microsoft debugger you can use it to figure out which DLL is crashing the computer (by looking at the stack trace), and unregister it. I’ve done this many times. Old divx codecs, for example, are pretty bad about crashing thumbnail view. If you are actually interested in debugging, let me know and I’ll post a more detailed explanation. But simply installing a new program (like irfanview above) might be the easiest sol
