Steps to reproduce:
- Create a new folder
- Create a new file in that folder
- Go to properties -> Security and deny yourself Read & Execute and Read rights
- Try to encrypt the folder using gpgex and kleopatra.
Result: The progressbar does not move and the dialog hangs around until you
abort it. Afterwards you can no longer do any other operations until you kill
gpg2.exe
Note:
If you just deny yourself Read access (and not Read&Execute) the action will
correctly fail with an error that you do not have read access.
What makes this issue more serious in my opinion than it first sounds is that if
you have such a file (which might even be a system created one) somehwere in a
large directory tree you want to encrypt it is nearly impossible to find it.
Try encrypting your /Users directory for example will always trigger this.
Happens both with smime and openpgp.