[Help] Explorer Slow

I use a wide variety of customization products - WindowBlinds, ObjectBar, ObjectDock, Konfabulator, and AveDesk. They all work perfectly well. My only complaint with them is that they (together, or perhaps one individually) cause all explorer-related functions to be unbearably slow. For example, to open the 'Programs' menu on the Start-Menu is very slow (no CPU load, just slow). Also, the 'Run' command, whether accessed from the Start Menu, an ObjectDock menu, or even Task Manager, takes an extremely long time to show up. Opening folder-windows (via Explorer) are also painstakingly slow. The rest of the computer is nice and snappy; once a folder window is open, for example, everything works as it should (except for Explorer-dependent things like Search, the Control-Panel items opening slowly, etc.).

For the sake of comparison, I have created another user account on the same computer, and removed only those five products from startup (leaving Sygate Personal Firewall Pro, NOD32, Topdesk, and NVIDIA nMixer) and left the default Windows XP theme alone. Basically, no modifications have been made to this account (aside from what Flyakite does to the system that affects all accounts) Everything is lightning-fast and quite snappy.

My question is this: has anyone else experienced such slowdowns and, has anyone pinpointed which piece of software would case these basic, simple functions to take forever to work?

For the sake of it-isn't-my-computer, here's the important specs:

AMD Athlon XP 3200+

1GB GeIL Ram, 2x 512 Dual-Channel

Abit NF7-S 2.0

Radeon 9600XT, Latest Drivers

160GB Western Digital Drive, 7200RPM

#315137

I noticed this happening to my system as well and based on my own experience I think Ave was the main culprit. After quiting Ave. all went back to normal. Then, after useing Windowblinds for about three years I decided to unload it and try just the patched shell.dll and that, to my surprise made a big difference as well.

#315139

Do you degfrag regularly? Reboot atleast once every few days? Uninstall old computer apps you dont use, scan for spyware/adaware? And so on...?

Important things when looking for every bit of performance.

#315141

I think have the same problem... I'm only running Windowblinds and Objectdock. Explorer is generally fine, but then at seemingly random times, it will just lock up for 5-20 seconds, even if it's just trying to display an empty folder. Really bizarre. Kind of annoyed that there's no way to diagnose what's going on, or that Windows would be so poorly written that this would be a problem in the first place no matter what program is running. I'd be very interested if you find a resolution for this.

(By the way, my hard drive is defragged regularly, and I'm extremely particular about keeping spyware out, and use a few registry cleaners to remove junk entries. I can't think of much else that would help as a general sort of fix.)

#315153

Asyntax:

I defrag weekly, defrag the pagefileMFT monthly, use Spybot and Ad-Aware, etc. I also attempted to uninstall anything unneeded before posting here, just for the sake of having done it.

I'll check out the AveDesk thing, and perhaps Windowblinds. Right now I'm just running WB, and I'm generally noticing good performance, but every once in a while the Start menu will lag a bit.

EDIT:

Right after posting this, the Start Menu decided it would lag a very noticable amount three or four times. WB may indeed be to fault. I need to spend more time without anything running to make sure there isn't simply something wrong somewhere within the registry that's only effecting my account.

EDIT 2:

After having spent today with only Avedesk running (customization-wise, anyways... NOD32, etc. are still on), I have concluded that it is NOT Avedesk (running by itself, anyways). Running with just Windowblinds seems to cause lockups similar to the ones I was experiencing, which is a major bummer. I'm going to try everything *but* WindowBlinds next.

#315237