Classic Shell: Forum

I was running 'Settings for Classic Start Menu 3.6.5' on a new notebook pc with Windows 8. I was on the Special Items tab. I changed the setting for 'Computer' from 'Display as a link' to 'Display as a menu'.

After clicking the 'Display as a menu' radio button, I clicked on the (Classic Shell) Start Button to view the change (I had recognized that certain changes are applied immediately to the Start Button behavior without having to save or exit the 'Settings for Classic Start Menu' program).

On the Start Menu, I moused over 'Computer'. My drives appeared as a drop-down list. I moused over the C: drive, and then continued to mouse over the subsequent, cascading folder/file lists as they appeared, going down 3 levels.

At that point, without clicking on anything, the Classic Shell Start Menu froze with all the submenus displayed across the screen. I could find no way to recover, no way to exit or kill Classic Shell, no way to run Task Manager, etc. I was forced to recycle power and reboot the system.

Any advise appreciated.

You may have hit some memory limit while browsing a large folder. The start menu is not intended to be a general-purpose file browser and is not optimized for such use.

One thing you can do is to try and capture a crash dump. Follow the directions here: viewtopic.php?f=12&t=6

Thanks for the reply. Just in case this problem is intrinsic to the 'Display as a menu' functionality, I have changed the 'Computer' setting back to 'Display as a link'.

FYI, I have not been able to reproduce the problem, but a memory constraint is rather unlikely. The pc has 8 GB RAM, and the only other programs running at the time were a couple of IE instances.

I'll try to capture a crash dump if it occurs again.

Other than this single event, I'm impressed with Classic Shell, and thankful for a fully-functioning Start button.

some programs allocate static amounts of memory for specific task (rather than dynamic, that can scale as required)
for example, text fields often exhibit a 255 character limit (+1character for a terminator) because some variables in some programming languages are limited to 256 Bytes, exceeding this usually results in a crash, whereas exceeding the ammount of ram you have, usually results in a section of the hardrive being used as a slower version of ram, usually resulting in the computer slowing down