After weeding through lots of posts from people experiencing this problem but having no solutions I finally found this one from Scott:
This happens consistently to me in Windows 7 after waking up from hibernate. Both “New Folder” and “Rename Folder” bring explorer.exe to a long hang. Eventually comes back, but kills whatever momentum you had. A little dismaying to see this on a brand new W7 laptop.
My workaround: Launch Task Manager Kill explorer.exe. Taskbar will disappear. File -> New Task -> explorer.exe. Taskbar should reappear. Close Task Manager
Problem was immediately cleared. But it’ll be back tonight…
The hang typically occurs after a resume, which for me is every time I use my computer. Once you see the hang occurring, you don’t have to wait to restart explorer. Just fire up Task Manager, kill explorer while its still waiting to create or rename the folder, and start a new explorer.
I came across that hint too, but it doesn’t work for me. Almost every time I am trying to rename some files that are around 12GB my Explorer hangs
Have you found anything that really fixes it?
Andreas
this happens to me too. i believe its related to whether or not there are PDF files in this folder or not. specifically newer dated PDF files. it also happens when moving PDF files from one folder to another. only recently this has started to happen. windows 7. [m]