I'm running centos 6 server (command line only) with midnight commander (mc-4.7.0.2-6.el6.x86_64) and it works ok until I try to open /media. It navigates all the other folders ok. To open /media I move the highlight to /media but it doesn't lock up until I press Enter on the keyboard. In a normal console (putty) I can navigate all over without any problems and I've set the permissions on /media to 777. In a console also I went to /media and tried to open mc from there but it locked up again. I haven't tried rebooting the machine (yet) because I'd like to see if i can solve this without that. I'm stumped, thanks for any help.

Have you got "preview" turned on??

preview? where's that?

First question I'd ask is, what's under /media??

For example, if you have a (slow) network share mounted (Google Drive, for example), it can take a good while to respond. Similarly, if you've got NFS/Samba shares that aren't ready or mounted, it'll attempt to get them read, until it times out. Same if you have a TON of files...it'll try to read/cache them all before it builds the tree.

solved: it was a folder (vps) under /media causing the trouble. I unmounted the vps folder using umount -l /media/vps but the folder was still mounted yet it now worked and I was able to get into /media without mc locking up. Strange problem but unmounting the vps folder solved it. Maybe it was mounted twice?