Ok, sorry I have been unable to get back on for most of the day, and thanks for the suggestions. The problem went way beyond LR, and my whole machine was bogging down unbelievably... It was taking 20 minutes - not seconds, *minutes* - to open a folder. Every time I hit a button in IE or Thunderbird, I got "not responding" for several minutes. I started getting error messages about a script hanging, something from Chrome, which I had, but hadn't used in over a year. I don't have it anymore.

I did a restore (very slowly...) to a point a couple of days ago, but it made no difference - except I had to uninstall Chrome once again!

I wouldn't say my catalogue was particular large or complicated. I have about 20,000 images in there, which is small time compared to what some have said on here.

Anyway, it seems pretty obvious that the problem was not caused by LR at all - although it *did* manifest in the minutes after I downloaded the new version... Because I did the system restore, I am not sure what versions I will be running when I try, but I don't have time tonight, and will be working most of tomorrow.

Thanks again for the suggestions... It is comforting to know that there are people on here who will try and help out when these things happen. Even the questions I knew were not at fault help me work through the problem. It has been a nerve-wracking few hours!

All this time, it was bogging down, but there was no strange process hogging CPU cycles or memory.

Finally, my automatic backup program failed on a single file - the same file which LR failed to export. Now, if you hit me over the head often enough with a big stick, I will eventually start to figure things out. I deleted that file - it was a tif, reimported from PS after an edit - and immediately things started moving again.

I have no idea how a file - no matter how corrupt - can cause a system to slow down catastrophically like this, when it was not being accessed by any program in any way, but it seems clear that this was the cause of the errors.

As far as memory leaks, I know them well! Anyone who used a version of windows before 7 came across them very often too! All the early versions had memory leaks within windows itself, where it did not release all the memory after certain processes had completed. It only has to be a few bytes, but when it happens over and over, eventually you run out of memory. This was the main reason for early windows versions being so unstable.

Ok, sorry I have been unable to get back on for most of the day, and thanks for the suggestions. The problem went way beyond LR, and my whole machine was bogging down unbelievably... It was taking 20 minutes - not seconds, *minutes* - to open a folder. Every time I hit a button in IE or Thunderbird, I got "not responding" for several minutes. I started getting error messages about a script hanging, something from Chrome, which I had, but hadn't used in over a year. I don't have it anymore.

I did a restore (very slowly...) to a point a couple of days ago, but it made no difference - except I had to uninstall Chrome once again!

I wouldn't say my catalogue was particular large or complicated. I have about 20,000 images in there, which is small time compared to what some have said on here.

Anyway, it seems pretty obvious that the problem was not caused by LR at all - although it *did* manifest in the minutes after I downloaded the new version... Because I did the system restore, I am not sure what versions I will be running when I try, but I don't have time tonight, and will be working most of tomorrow.

Thanks again for the suggestions... It is comforting to know that there are people on here who will try and help out when these things happen. Even the questions I knew were not at fault help me work through the problem. It has been a nerve-wracking few hours!

All this time, it was bogging down, but there was no strange process hogging CPU cycles or memory.

Finally, my automatic backup program failed on a single file - the same file which LR failed to export. Now, if you hit me over the head often enough with a big stick, I will eventually start to figure things out. I deleted that file - it was a tif, reimported from PS after an edit - and immediately things started moving again.

I have no idea how a file - no matter how corrupt - can cause a system to slow down catastrophically like this, when it was not being accessed by any program in any way, but it seems clear that this was the cause of the errors.

As far as memory leaks, I know them well! Anyone who used a version of windows before 7 came across them very often too! All the early versions had memory leaks within windows itself, where it did not release all the memory after certain processes had completed. It only has to be a few bytes, but when it happens over and over, eventually you run out of memory. This was the main reason for early windows versions being so unstable.

I just finished upgrading my LR CC this morning, opened the new version and set it to export 37 images which I had finished editing last night. Went to the mailbox, got my mail, read it, dealt with it, came back to the PC, and LR was 22% complete. In all, it took nearly 30 minutes to complete the export process. I say complete, because it missed one of the images. I got an error box saying it failed to export 1 image with an unspecified error. I set it to export just this single image, and it has been running for more than 5 minutes so far, with no movement on the progress bar... Trying to select the image, every time I clicked on anything, LR went "not responding" for several seconds before doing anything.
Something is not right here...

Anyone else have this kind of problem?

Oh, I should add that my system is running at 4% _CPU, 29% memory, and 60% disk usage.

Exactly the same... There was no difference from the hundreds I have been working on recently. Something was definitely wrong with it, but I have no idea what. It opened and displayed fine in Irfanview, which I use as my image viewer. It would display ok within LR, and had been passed through PS and some of the NIK tools, but so had all the others.

I cannot for the life of me figure out why or how a file - just sitting on the drive - can slow a system down as catastrophically as it did to mine! The figures I gave in my last message were not an exaggeration. It felt like the PC was thrashing and trying to work on something for all it was worth, but there were no processes taking up CPU cycles, or memory, and there was tons of disk space available. As soon as I removed that file, everything came back to normal, but it wasn't *doing* anything! One of the stranger episodes I have had with windows, really.

I just finished upgrading my LR CC this morning, opened the new version and set it to export 37 images which I had finished editing last night. Went to the mailbox, got my mail, read it, dealt with it, came back to the PC, and LR was 22% complete. In all, it took nearly 30 minutes to complete the export process. I say complete, because it missed one of the images. I got an error box saying it failed to export 1 image with an unspecified error. I set it to export just this single image, and it has been running for more than 5 minutes so far, with no movement on the progress bar... Trying to select the image, every time I clicked on anything, LR went "not responding" for several seconds before doing anything.
Something is not right here...

Anyone else have this kind of problem?

Oh, I should add that my system is running at 4% CPU, 29% memory, and 60% disk usage.

I just finished upgrading my LR CC this morning, opened the new version and set it to export 37 images which I had finished editing last night. Went to the mailbox, got my mail, read it, dealt with it, came back to the PC, and LR was 22% complete. In all, it took nearly 30 minutes to complete the export process. I say complete, because it missed one of the images. I got an error box saying it failed to export 1 image with an unspecified error. I set it to export just this single image, and it has been running for more than 5 minutes so far, with no movement on the progress bar... Trying to select the image, every time I clicked on anything, LR went "not responding" for several seconds before doing anything.
Something is not right here...

Anyone else have this kind of problem?

Oh, I should add that my system is running at 4% CPU, 29% memory, and 60% disk usage.