One of the really cool features of Windows is the AVI preview in Explorer. What this does is scans an AVI file for all the properties, like height, width, color depth, and more.
Windows Explorer sometimes will “hang”, utilizing 100% of the CPU when scanning one of these files. This could be due to the file not being completely downloaded yet, or maybe it was encoded with a codec that is not installed on the system.
Fortunately, there is a relatively easy fix for this issue.
Start the registry editor, and navigate to the following key:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\SystemFileAssociations\.avi\shellex\PropertyHandler
Delete the “Default” value which should be:
{87D62D94-71B3-4b9a-9489-5FE6850DC73E}