I was having an issue on a Windows Server 2003 box today with the properties dialog hanging, not showing, or just plaing missing when I try to obtain the properties for a directory. This only seemed to effect the directories on a network share, however. In addition, explorer.exe would consume 100% of the CPU usage indefinitely.

After an hour or so of digging around on the internet and trying various googles, I finally came across an article about Missing properties dialog from Explorer on Google Groups. Turns out the poster was right and the culprit is Internet Explorer. Re-installing it via the following command had the problem fixed after a reboot:

rundll32.exe setupapi,InstallHinfSection DefaultInstall 132 %windir%\inf\ie.inf

I’m glad standard system functions rely on an Internet browser.