PA 21.00.18 running on Windows 7 64 bit.
I made a big .PA file and thought I’d check it was made correctly with Menu / Actions / Test.
Discovered:
a) PA always issues a UAC prompt to do this!
b) PA always says there are many errors in PA files.

Re: Explorer.exe Crash on right click

This appears to be happening again with the Power Archiver 2022 shell extensions.

When I have Use Explorer Shell Extensions enabled in Power Archiver Configuration and right-click on c:\Users\username\Start Menu, (hidden Junction file), File Explorer crashes.

I have version 21.00.15 (03/2022) 64-bit installed in Windows 10 Version 21H2 (Build 19044.1826).

In the latest version of PA, on W11 (latest build/SP) when you try to use the first level context menu - NOTHING HAPPENS (particularly when you do this from Downloads or Documents folders) - however I noticed that it DOES WORK when you use the context menu from the Desktop. Going to the second level context menu does work however.

PA 2023 22.00.08
Long time no seeing. So I start up the new year with a first problem : the virtual driver cannot be installed. Reason : it is missing in the Fast Ring PatchBeam Update Service…
Virtual driver PA 2023-01-28 152607.png
It seems a standard problem with new releases :-)
Can I have a link or can it be fixed. Thank you. CU later

I just tried using PA2017 to create a .pa extreme compression archive of a DSF file.
I left # of threads at Auto Select and it used 1 thread (25% CPU usage)
I cancelled that and created it again, this time manually selecting 4 threads and now it’s using 100% of the CPU.

When the function for testing archives is invoked via the shell context menu (PowerArchiver > Test) then all the files in the archive get extracted to the current folder.

The test dialog reports as many errors as there are files in the archive but it fails to give any hint as to which files are supposed to be erroneous or what the nature of the problem might be. Comparing the extracted files to the originals shows no differences at all.

The .7z in question was produced with maximised compression settings in 7zip (taking forever but resulting in smaller archives than .7z produced by PowerArchiver with maximised settings). Therefore I wanted to see whether PowerArchiver can at least test .7z that it produced itself. Hence I had PowerArchiver convert a .pa with the same contents to .7z. There weren’t any errors reported but the resulting .7z contained fewer than half of the files contained in the .pa (137 of 366), so I scratched that test.

Performance is abysmal when testing via the context menu (e.g. almost 2 minutes for testing a .7z that 7zip tests in 4 seconds), but that is most likely due to the fact that the extracted files are written to disk. Testing the same .7z in the PowerArchiver GUI takes only 8 seconds but causes the mysterious appearance of a UAC dialog, as reported elsewhere.

The testing function is vital because PowerArchiver has a history of producing archives that it cannot unpack without errors or that do not conform to the respective file format standards (e.g. ZIP) so that other programs report them as erroneous.

The point of creating archives is that the files in them will most likely have to be extracted at some point. If the extraction cannot be guaranteed to produce correct results then the whole program is absolutely pointless. Actually, worse than pointless - it causes data loss and hence damage.