Long time for right-click

[ThePuzzleMaster]

Recently, my computer started taking a long time to display the menu window after I righ-click something. It tends to happen mostly on my desktop. It doesn't happen all the tme though. Sometimes it's instant as per usual, and other times it takes over 5 seconds to display the window. I tried closing all extraneous programs in teh task manager. That didn't seem to solve anything. No abnormal logs in the events viewer...

Anyone seen this before? Have any thoughts what might be causing it? Just started happening the other day.

I'm running win xp pro sp2...

 

[w00t]

It used to happen with my mom's old dell it had intergrated graphics and my bro would play games so when i installed new drivers he would get worst frames so I had to move them back. after my bro stopped playing games I updated the graphic card drivers and it stopped doing it.

try updating your drivers just outa curoisty is it some intel extreme graphics?

 

[ThePuzzleMaster]

No intel extreme... It's an eVGA 6600GT. I'll try updating the drivers and see if that fixes anything. I'll let you know how it goes.

Thanks.

 

[w00t]

make sure you use a program like driver cleaner.

 

[fire400]

could possibly be system memory, but I agree with the diamond member becuz old drivers will cause slow down even if you have a new gfx card installed.

if you just simply can't stand it, restore your system.

 

[ThePuzzleMaster]

Well it wasn't the display drivers. I'm updating a few other drivers which I found had updates available... So maybe that's it. It's weird because nothing else seems to be sluggish at all. Just the right-clicking. I have 2 Gigs of RAM, but they're just set to auto-config in the bios, so I might try setting those a bit better...

Thanks for all the suggestions... Still working on it.

 

[ThePuzzleMaster]

No dice... I updated the display drivers, chipset drivers, set the RAM more appropriately. Still have the delay

Fire, by "restore my system" are you referring to a full re-install? Or a system restore to a previous date? I don't have any programs that'll do that that I know of, unless one comes with xp...

 

[Bozo Galora]

i have seen a virus, do this
Or the antivirus prog itself
Or your computer hijacked - use proccess explorer app to see whats running in backround
>and spare me the "I scanned with NAV and found nothing"


or memory leak
use bysoft freeram and watch avail mem

this is one of those things a reformat fixes - or a XP rollback to a previous date.

 

[ThePuzzleMaster]

Well no detections using AntiVir... I've got 71% free mem, and I don't notice any processes that shouldn't be there...

I tried disabling almost all running tasks with no change. It's the same way on both of my hard drives.

And although a reformat or a rollback will fix the problem (And I'll probably end up doing that...) it would be nice to know what's the cause...

 

[L00PY]

It's probably not a virus or spyware. What probably happened is that you installed a program that lets you create a "new" filetype. When you right click, that software is doing some junk to prepare to create a new one of those files. What you need to do is remove that "create a new file type" from the right context menu. I forget where that option is located -- you may need to install TweakUI from the Windows PowerToys to adjust that.

 

[ThePuzzleMaster]

If you're talking about the New file type option when you right click on the desktop, I don't think that's it as there's never any lag when I right click on the desktop. It only happens when I click on files. And only usually more than one file.

Could it have to do with sharing or security settings?

 

[ThePuzzleMaster]

Alrighty. It definitely has something to do with my LAN. After I disabled my NIC it completely went away!

Re-enabled it... RIGHT back to lagging!

Any thoughts?

 

[L00PY]

I still think it's a similar issue to the one I described above. The right click context menu brings up or fires off all sorts of crap depending on the available options. There's only the "Open With" and "Send To" options that get modified. Check through those. You might have some sort of location available through your NIC in the "Send To" that's trying to be accessed that's causing your delay. Again, TweakUI should let you remove the offending item.

 

[ThePuzzleMaster]

I'd been trying to set up a network amongst my machines recently, and it may be related to that. I ended up runnign the network wizard a few times... I ended up giving up on setting up a network that way and just access my machiens through directly accessing their ip's. There doesn't seem to be any way to "reset" my network status that I could find... I ran netshell reset.

I'll try removing some programs and see if that fixes anything. Is there a way to list the programs that I've installed chronologically? In order of when they were installed?

Thanks for the help.

 

[ThePuzzleMaster]

WElllllll... I restored my system to a little over a week ago and everything seems to be back to normal again.

I'm pretty sure it had something to do with all the network setting up I did. I think I just added too much garbage in there. No real definitive answer though... I think I'm going to reformat anyways. It's a good thing to do...

Thanks to all for your help, and for all the good program recommendations. Those are some pretty handy apps and I'd never used any of them before.