Beating the freeze - Disabling XP's built-in ZIP support

I'm often downloading and experimenting with all sorts of software and more often than not those downloads are packages as a ZIP file. Out of habit I dump all of those zip files in a single archive folder. A nasty side effect of XP's built-in support for ZIP files is that when I use Windows Explorer to open that archive folder Explorer and often other applications just freeze for a few minutes. The cause is that Explorer is trying to open and examine all of the ZIP files in the folder... gggrrr...

Thanks to this post I now have the solution to disabling the built-in ZIP support (I prefer using 7-zip anyway).

To disable XP's ZIP support:

1. Select Run from the Start menu and enter

regsvr32 /u %windir%\system32\zipfldr.dll

2. Click OK.


To re-enable XP's ZIP support:

1. Select Run from the Start menu and enter

regsvr32 %windir%\system32\zipfldr.dll

2. Click OK.