This evening, Picasa suddenly started freezing on Windows 10 here. (Yes, it has been officially discontinued for years now... but for my workflow, it is still much better than many of the alternatives I've tried, and so, until I manage to get my own self-built alternative up and running, I'm continuing to use it...)
After a whole bunch of sleuthing (including deleting my old DB and rebuilding it, in case of some database corruption there), it turns out that the culprit was Windows Defender!
TLDR: To fix this, add an exclusion for the following setting (i.e. "Block Untrusted Fonts") for Picasa3.exe
EDIT: Posted too soon! While doing that gets things moving a little at least, a few seconds later, after letting you scroll, it will again lock up, while it now starts another batch of CPU activity. Doh! (Trying again with disabling a whole lot more to see what sticks...)
EDIT 2: Tried a bunch more stuff, but annoyingly each "fix" only seems to last about 5 seconds before Windows Defender catches on and locks down even harder!
Things that didn't go down well:
* Going through disabling *every* checkbox in that infernal program-settings-override dialog. Doing that just makes it worse it seems!
* Switching "Compatability Mode" to "Windows 8" - This worked for about 5 seconds (i.e. longer than when just doing "open + scroll" tests, but still it locked right up!
Ultimately, after an hour of testing this crap, I'm going have to call it a night on this here, and have ended up filing a bugreport with MS about this... hopefully they do resolve it! Gah!
(PS: The project to again try to migrate my personal workstation to Linux ahead of October just got another massive boost again tonight!)
How I found the problem:
* 1) First I thought I had a DB corruption issue, so I went to find the DB to find files to blow away and try again. These were located under: "c:\users\<username>\AppData\Local\Google\". In that process:
a) I found that there was a folder ("Picasa2\db3") with lots of files (e.g. thumbnails, etc.) that looked like the main DB. That one clearly would need to go to reset any corruption
b) I also found that the "Picasa2\runtime" folder contained a whole bunch of ".ytf" files with various font names. Very interesting... more on this in a moment!
c) Another surprise was that all the starred images are actually listed in one file here (in addition to the per-folder Picasa.ini copies). Specifically, the "Picasa2\db3\starlist.txt" file. (This may come in handy for some future work I'm doing on this front)
* 2) So then I went ahead and deleted those folders, and restarted Picasa to get it to rebuild the DB. Observations:
a) The splash screen still didn't show up
b) Startup was fast, but then the rest of the UI kept locking up still
c) Monitoring the process explorer for CPU usage, I notice the "MsMpEng.exe" kept spooling up and "working" for a few seconds at a time... hmm... Having previously done battle with this thing at previous job (where it devastated our startup time for PyInstaller bundled executables when loaded from Network Share drives, causing them to go from a few seconds load times out to 20 *MINUTE* lockups (with no feedback on screen, but high CPU usage), this cursed security system was already high on my list of potential culprits.
d) However, I decided to wait until all the Facial Tagging had completed, before trying again (in case it was that that was causing the lockups)
e) But nope... when all other CPU usage was quiet, I was still getting lockups! BUT, now, watching what was happening, I could confirm that it was in fact MsMpEng.exe spooling up everytime I went for to click or try to scroll in that window!
* 3) This lead me to look into trying to figure out how to whitelist that particular executable. But then, it showed me the dialog to choose which exceptions to apply!
* 4) At this point, I took a punt on the "untrusted fonts" thing, given what I'd seen in the runtime folder earlier. And voila! It worked!
Detailed Steps for Adding the Exception
Here are the detailed steps (as of 13 July 2025), given that I had some difficulty finding the place to edit initially:
1) Start Menu, click the "Settings" Cog
2) Click "Windows Security" in the left-hand pane
3) Go to "App & Browser Control"
4) Click "Exploit protection settings" (blue link) under "Exploit Protection" heading (last one) on that page
5) Change to the "Program settings" tab
6) Click the "+" square beside "Add program to customise", then choose "Choose exact file path"
7) Browse to "C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Picasa3" and select "Picasa3.exe"
8) Check the "Override system settings" checkbox for the "Block untrusted fonts" section
9) Some red text shall appear saying that you need to close the executable in question (i.e. Picasa). Do so now.
10) Click "Apply"
11) Restart Picasa
12) At this point, it *should* start up and be responsive again... at least that's what happened for me when I did this.
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