[Solution] Microsoft ICE hangs at 0% when loading images

[Amra]

I want to post this solution here, because I found no tips when googling this issue, so that anyone that runs into the same problem, might find this thread when googling for a solution.

Actually, I lied when I said I found no tips, but it took several hours of frustrating troubleshooting, hair pulling & searching, and then suddenly I read a useful tip somewhere that I've already forgotten, so I can't give that individual credit here, unfortunately.

Anyway, on to the solution.

I discovered that Microsoft ICE hangs @ 0% when loading images from an external hard drive, if you move the files to your local hard drive C and then drag them into Microsoft ICE, it works!

So simple, yet I couldn't understand why ICE had worked just fine earlier & then wouldn't work at all. My workflow usually never involves moving files to my local drive, unless I'm testing something, and I had tested stitching with some files on the desktop just to see how it worked, and it worked beautifully, then later on I tried to stitch my carefully organized files on my external hard drive and it wouldn't do a thing, very annoying, but I'm happy I found out why eventually!

Hopefully this will be useful info for someone.