Explorer / My Computer taking ages to find drives and folders.

[muppet]

Ok......I've been asked to "take a look" at a friends PC as it has slowed down a lot lately!!! Anyway, having updated the AV and run a scan, installed all O/S updates (XP Home), run CCleaner, uninstalled all the software she no longer uses, installed more RAM and DeFrag'd the system all now seems to be running a lot faster.................

Except that Explorer / "My Computer" takes about 40 secs to list Drives and Folders! I know that 40 seconds isn't long, but I also know that this information should be listed much quicker than this. I've hit a blank and can't think what can be causing it....I've searched other Forums as well for info and have tried everything I can find (disabling the WIA service, there's no Network Drives attached) but without any luck.

If anyone has any ideas please feel free to post.....this is driving me up the wall now!!!

[SYNACK]

Dodgy DVD drive taking a long time to report back maybe, have had that happen before.

[muppet]

Cheers Synack, I'll remember that one for next time......Unfortunately it's not the cause this time! I've disconnected all non-essential items, including DVD / front USB / card reader / sound + mike connections, and I'm still getting the same problem.

Have just created a new user account and the same thing happens with that one. Aaaaaarrrrrrrrgggggghhhhhhhh! Think it's going to be one of those weeks....at least I'm off on hols next week, I can't wait.

[ZeroHour]

So what is left listed?

Also can you ensure there are no autorun.inf files in the root of any hard disks?

[SYNACK]

Have you run a scandisk and checkdisk on it to make sure that both the hard drive and filesystem on the hard drives is in good shape, have also had this cause slowdowns. It could also be a messed up my computer extention like a bluetooth app that has left rubbish on the system that attempts to trigger each time. Have you run procmon and regmon (assuming XP) from sysinternals/technet on it while opening My Computer, this should show you what files and registry keys are being accessed at the time and may help you track it down to a culprit.

 

Tools Below:

Process Monitor

FileMon for Windows

RegMon for Windows

[glennda]

when you say removed are they physically disconnected or are they just disabled?

[dhicks]

If anyone has any ideas please feel free to post...

 

Do the BIOS settings think there's still a floppy drive installed?

 

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David Hicks

[mac_shinobi]

Got a few mapped network drives that are slow to connect to which makes the explorer process slow to show what I am connected to with ref to mapped network drives, optical drives etc so not sure if that has anything to do with it

[muppet]

With everything disconnected all that's listed in Explorer is C: , Shared Documents folder and User folders.

Scandisk and ChkDsk show no issues.

Procmon doesn't show anything out of the norm, but it has been a long day so I might be missing something! Will have another look at it tomorrow.

No Mapped drives at all.

No Floppy shown in the Bios.

If I boot into Safe the problem still persists.

 

Thanks to everyone for their help trying to resolve this issue........it really is driving me up the wall not knowing what's causing it.

In the meantime if anyone has any other ideas please let me know, I'd hate to be beaten and just rebuild it!!

[glennda]

hmm i which anti-virus are u using?? could be trying to scan the files in the my docs on read or something

[pritchardavid]

I had this prolem before, also had this problem on win98

 

I also done alot of searching when I had this problem... Im afriad the only way I found to sort it out is a nice clean install of windows

[ZeroHour]

With everything disconnected all that's listed in Explorer is C: , Shared Documents folder and User folders.

Scandisk and ChkDsk show no issues.

Procmon doesn't show anything out of the norm, but it has been a long day so I might be missing something! Will have another look at it tomorrow.

No Mapped drives at all.

No Floppy shown in the Bios.

If I boot into Safe the problem still persists.

 

Thanks to everyone for their help trying to resolve this issue........it really is driving me up the wall not knowing what's causing it.

In the meantime if anyone has any other ideas please let me know, I'd hate to be beaten and just rebuild it!!

 

Did you check for the autorun.inf in the root? it may be a hidden file.

[dhicks]

In the meantime if anyone has any other ideas please let me know

 

Any extra partitions on the harddrive, or does Windows have the harddrive to itself?

 

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David Hicks

[muppet]

Yep I've checked the root for autorun.inf's, but couldn't find any.

As for AV.....it had an outdated Norton on it, I uninstalled that and put AVG Free on it and ran a scan.

Looks like its going to be a clean install!!!!!

[muppet]

@ David,

It's got a recovery partition on it............whats your thinking?

But so has the other identical one her kids use and that's ok!

[DAZZD88]

There wouldn't be compressed files like zip files in the root of C: would there? This tends to slow down Windows Explorer.

 

Also when you have defragged, often a third-party tool will allow you to optimize as well. Have you tried this?

[dhicks]

It's got a recovery partition on it............whats your thinking? But so has the other identical one her kids use and that's ok!

 

I just thought maybe Windows is trying to assign a drive letter to that partition, then getting confused when it finds the partition is in some format other than NTFS/FAT. If the other identical one works fine then it's probably not that.

 

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David Hicks

[_Adam_]

Boot up in Safe Mode with Networking...is the slowness still there? If it is not use MSCONFIG to disable services/start up programs (all of them), then slowly reintroduce them logically testing each time - something here will be causing it. If it's there in safe mode, I'll need to think more