Critical: This mod breaks Explorer and causes black screen

[tiyadegure]

This mod is seriously problematic.

After enabling "explorer-details-better-file-sizes", my system ended up in a state where:

• Explorer never fully loads
• Desktop stays black
• Taskbar and icons do not appear
• Windhawk shows "Waiting for symbols" and gets stuck

This effectively makes the system unusable.

This is not just a minor issue — it completely breaks the Windows shell.

Environment:

• Windows version: Windows 11 (please specify exact build if needed)
• Windhawk version: 1.7.1
• Mod: explorer-details-better-file-sizes

Steps to reproduce:

1. Enable the mod
2. Restart Explorer or reboot
3. System gets stuck on black screen

Expected behavior:
Explorer should load normally.

Actual behavior:
Explorer is stuck and desktop never appears.

This mod is dangerous in its current state and should not be enabled without clear warning.

This issue can easily soft-lock users out of their system, which is unacceptable.
I had to force reboot and manually disable Windhawk to recover the system.

[m417z]

In some cases, it may delay explorer startup until symbols are loaded (9% on your screenshot). I agree that it's not optimal, and I'll try to improve it in future.

[steveji2021]

In some cases, it may delay explorer startup until symbols are loaded (9% on your screenshot). I agree that it's not optimal, and I'll try to improve it in future.

In some places connection to MS public symbol server is REALLY slow. Your symbol cache (on github.io) is also slow. Please consider adding a option for setting mirrors for symbol server. Or use the settings from _NT_SYMBOL_PATH environment variable.