Right Clicking Recycle Bin Crashes Explorer

[4th gen]

bit of a strange problem has developed on my machine...

as the topic title says, when i right click on my recycle bin to empty, the right click menu doesn't come up, the mouse pointer changes to the egg timer and then my puter becomes very slow, with very high cpu and ram usage (90+% and 70+MB ram given to explorer)

to continue using the puter, i have to close explorer.exe and restart it using task manager

there's about 2 or 3 gig worth of files in the recycle bin, but i've emptied more than that before

i've also got norton systemworks installed, so i have the protected recycle bin...

i've left it to try and sort it out for about five minutes, but there's no change in the situation, the ram usage of explorer increases slightly, about 100KB per minute or so, nothing much

Running:

Windows XP Home SP1
ASUS A7N8X-D
512MB Corsair Ram
80GB Seagate, 120GB Western Digital, 250GB Western Digital S-ATA Drives
radeon 9600 Pro 128MB
Lite-On 52/24/52 CD-RW

any help or advice would be greatly appreciated

[shn]

You may have too many gigs crammed in there. I never allow my bin to hold that much because it takes longer to delete the more you let it pile up.

I set mine to less than 5 percent of the drive. When it comes to deleting huge files over 500 megs I generally let them bypass the recyle bin and just delete them instead of it making an unecessary trip to the bin.

And if it is norton protected then take the norton protection off and see if it works then. If Im using norton it better catch a virus before i do and delete it. Thus, where is the need to have a norton protected trash can?

[BigBank_Hank]

4th gen did you try to access the recycle bin via the windows explorer? Sometimes my computer goes crazy and thats the only way I can empty the recycle bin because it does the same thing.

[4th gen]

i feel really stupid just now... :">

i forced norton to close from task manager earlier, so i've left the protected recycle bin in limbo...

i'm sure the problem will go away when i reboot (and restart norton)...

if i'd tried the easiest problem fixer, the reboot, it would have been fixed

thanks for the reply though, my stupidity was the problem