Here's a good one: Windows Explorer Clicks Slow
Community Forums/General Help/Here's a good one: Windows Explorer Clicks Slow
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| Here's a really odd one that I can't figure out. If I right click or double click on something in Windows Explorer, it's very slow to respond. If I double click a folder, it takes a good ten seconds before I hear the click sound. The context menu varies, but is usually quite slow. Oddly, nothing else seems to be affected. Navigating files and folders in other software is lightning fast. Navigating in the side panel of Windows explorer (where only a click is required) is also lightning fast. Mouse clicks, right clicks and double clicks all work perfectly in every other application. Memory use is very low. CPU usage is minimal (1%). There's precious little running. DropBox, Steam, Kaspersky and that's about it. Hard drive performance in big or small files is very quick. Can even play a pretty demanding game without a frame dropped. What could possibly affect only the right-click / double-click speed and only in Windows Explorer? EDIT: Not sure if this helps or hinders, but my best theory so far is something networked. It's quite a long pause and it's out of place. I'm thinking it's something like Dropbox or something on the network which WE is checking when I navigate. That doesn't really explain why single clicking in the left panel or typing the folder in the address bar bypasses it though. |
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| I've run into something similar before, ridiculously slow times to navigate / populate explorer windows. It turned out to be the fault of McAfee Antivirus. (Quick check: Try to disable your antivirus on-access scan option, and see if the problem goes away) The root cause: Any time you change folders, McAfee does an (internal) directory listing as part of the scan. However, if there was a *disconnected network drive* present, it would cause significant delays before the current folder was processed, even if the drive you were looking at was a different one altogether. from a command prompt, type: net use See if there are any disconnected drives. As soon as I removed the mappings with net use <driveletter> /D everyting was blazing fast again. (Of course the real solution would be to not use such a buggy antivirus program, but...) |
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| net use just gives me an empty list. I don't think Kaspersky does on-access scans when changing folders, but I tried disabling the on-access scans and it didn't go away. Thanks for the suggestions. I'm uploading a few files on Dropbox at the moment (I wasn't when the problem started) but when that's finished, I'll try disabling Dropbox and see if that is interfering. |
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| Something that might help track it down, is SysInternals ProcMon (Free download) It shows you a real-time overview of *everything* that is being (attempted) to read/write, on the filesystem, registry, or network. Can be a great help tracking down what program is doing what, and where it's trying to look. (Limit your viewing to either filesystem or registry at a time though, doing -everything- is an insame amount of data. It's absolutely ridiculous once you see what all is happening in the background in windows) Anyway, using procmon to monitor may tell you what program or subsystem is trying to do things when you click. You may find that it is a background process like anti-malware / anti-virus / registry monitor / whatever that's being responsible. (It helped me find out what was causing Nero to freeze on startup, for example. It turned out on each launch it was re-parsing the last folder I burned to Bluray before it would show me the GUI . That folder hierarchy turned out to be my programming directories which had close to half a million files in it) |
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| Try using ShellExView to progressively disable shell extensions: http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shexview.html |
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| Thanks very much for the tip. I had no idea that ProcMon existed, although I remember FileMon and RegMon back in the day. I'm playing around with it now, and my first impressions are that it does seem to be connected to Dropbox. Hopefully, I'll be able to figure it out with a bit more time. Thanks! |
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