Windows Live Phot Gallery continually loses thumbnails, requires lengthy rescan of photos to rebuild thumbnail cache.
I've continued to have this problem ever since the Photo gallery was changed from the built-in version that shipped with Windows Vista, through the most current version downloaded through Microsoft Update on Windows 7. My collection of photos is rather large, in excess of 87,000 individual photos across the entire My Photos folder, broken into a couple dozen main subfolders, and several thousand subfolders. In Windows Vista, the bundled Photo Gallery functioned with no problems. After the change to the "Live" branded version, in Vista, Windows 7 Beta, Windows 7 RC and Windows 7 RTM, all from clean installs, from one login session to the next, massive numbers of thumbnails get lost, requiring a rebuild of the entire thumbnails cache, which takes many hours (overnight). At best, I've think that maybe after a half-dozen log-offs, the thumbails cache loses between 25%-75% of the thumbnails, requiring renaming the cache file and allowing Live Photo gallery to rediscover all of the thumbnails again. I have tried installing MSSQL server 2005 to see if there was a way to direct the Gallery to use that engine as its database, without luck. I have modified the registry to increase the size of BagMRUSize to 50000 hex to allow the Windows thumbnail cache to accomodate the collection, but this of course has no bearing on the Gallery thumbnail cache.
Is this problem evidence of a functional limitation within Live Photo Gallery, or is some other problem causing this?
