after clicking file /open the pictures show the correct size but the preview says there 1.3gb and refuses to load the thumbnails.
Saving is the same way as well says there 1.3gb or in some cases bigger which making a file under a certain size hard.
ive formatted the drive and zeroed it as well the problem is still there and also tried it on win xp and ubuntu/wine all seem to have the problem as well. i can post links to pictures of the problem if needed.
im using the latest Gimp 2.8 portable revision
This is a known bug in GIMP for Windows. Reading through the comments, it sounds like the bug may have been fixed for the next release of GIMP.
You should be able to interact with your files still, though. I just tried, and can both load previews, and save images. If this is not the case, please let us know, and we can investigate some more.