winxp: strange explorer activity when touching avi files

hi i use win xp pro on all my machines. and it behaves really weird. whenever i "touch" a .avi file (meaning i hover over it with the mouse cursor, or click on it to select it, or right click to get properties, or click again to rename it) i can see in task manager's process view that explorer.exe hat 90% or so processor capacity. this means playback is really choppy (im sitting on a 600MHz computer right now) because explorer and player have like 50% processor each. so i started renaming my .avi files to .movie. this works. but takes a while. after i clicked a file to rename it, i have to watch the task manager to see when explorer activity goes down again and then hit return. because while explorer is busy with the file it wont even let me rename it ("someone else is using the file"-error). does anyone know why this is? strangely i didnt find anything about it in the internet, but i dont know how i could cause this myself so it would only happen on my machines. please tell me anyone how i can kill this behaviour. greets Peter

Sounds like something that could be fixed with this:

nice. thank you very much. thats the solution. now i have a new problem. i connected my .movie files with the divx player. now i tried it with the avi files (open with/always use this program), but when i click an avi file next time it will be opened with wmp 9 again. why is that? it always worked in the past to connect avi files to other players.

For some reason, you have to explicitly unassign avi files from WMP9 from the WMP9 options, ot it'll keep on opening the associated file extensions. Hope this helps.

thanks that helped. wow. what an efficient thread.

I searched many times for a somewhat related problem with high cpu usage / activity with mpg / mpeg files. So, I will post this link for others searching for a solution.