Digikam processes don't quit when user exits Digikam, and files remain locked.

It appears that on Windows 10/11, exiting Digikam leaves a background 
process which may continue to hold active file handles or locks, 
preventing a subsequent Digikam instance from accessing those files.

I am using Digikam 8.7.0 with SQLite.

I can replicate the issue as follows:

 1. When I start digikam, Process Explorer shows a new digikam.exe
    process.   If, not having done anything, I stop the digikam process
    by pressing the red "x" in the upper right hand corner, the
    digikam.exe process shown in Process Explorer does not exit.  After
    a short period of activity, is settles down and consumes less than
    .01 cpu and no I/O.  I left it running like this for 15min, and
    nothing changed.
    This process shows a large number of handles; it looks like there is
    one handle per directory holding my photo collection. These
    directories are on a drive mounted on another computer on my LAN.
 2. If I restart digikam, a new process with a different PID starts. 
    Again, doing nothing, I exit as above, and I see a second background
    process, doing nothing, with similar open handles.
 3. This can be repeated /ad nausium,/ leaving an additional process
    each time.
 4. The drive containing my collections is a network drive mapped to
    "\\192.168.1.10\Media", were the system at 192.168.1.10 is a Windows
    10 system with an internal drive D: having label "Media".
 5. /I find that if I try to change the name of one of the
    collections/directories in digikam, it reports an error.  If I try
    to rename the same directory in windows, it reports that the folder
    is in use by another process./
 6. I have repeated the above experiments exiting Digikam using
    "Browse->Quit" and get the same result.
 7. The only way I can get rid of these background processes is to kill
    them.
    /However, when I restart digikam after killing all the background
    processes, I still get the same error when trying to re-name.
    / However, I /can /rename the folders by accessing the mapped drive
    directly.
 8. I suspect that the underlying issue is that
     1. SQLite does not release some internal locks, and / or
     2. Digikam should re-attach to any background process rather than
        start a new one.
 9. The system on which I am running Digikam is  Windows 11.  The system
    hosting the image collections is Windows 10.  Both systems are
    up-to-date.

Any help or insight will be greatly appreciated

-- 
George Koulomzin
7 Bridge Hill Lane,
PO Box 781
Bridgehampton, NY, 11932
(m) 914-393-6179
(h) 631-537-4956
[email protected]