Long open times when clicking My Computer

December 8, 2008 5:01 AM

We'll I always thought of myself as a pretty dang good computer troubleshooter, but this one really has me stumped. My Windows XP Pro SP3 rig takes 10 seconds to display items after clicking My Computer. There is no search light in the window when opening - just blank until things show up. I have two hard drives listed. 6 Removable storage items, 1 mapped network drive, Mozy and 2 scanners listed. I have tried many things to speed this up: Deleted the mapped network drive. Disabled WIA in services. Unplugged and uninstalled scanners. Tried various registry hacks for stopping things like checking network drives for scheduled tasks and other things found on the internet. All with no success to here I stand with hat in hand...asking for some help with this annoying problem.
posted by Jackie_Treehorn to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

Have you looked at task manager when this occurs? Whats the memory/CPU usage like? Are there any active processes that seem to be consuming more than their share?
posted by kaydo at 5:08 AM on December 8, 2008

Is your virus scanner set to scan network drives?I know that some virus scanners will make Jungledisk (similar to Mozy) hang for a while before opening up.

Try disabling your AV, if the problem goes away, just set your AV software not to scan the mozy drive.
posted by Static Vagabond at 5:24 AM on December 8, 2008

Response by poster: kaydo:

Task Manager when idle shows 00 cpu and 84mb memory. When I double click My Computer it shows 98 cpu and 112mb memory. It returns to 00-02 cpu after about 3 seconds. The My Computer then shows my items about 7 seconds later. Memory remains at 112mb.
posted by Jackie_Treehorn at 5:57 AM on December 8, 2008

Response by poster: Static Vagabond:

I have AVG free installed on my machine. Last week I completely uninstalled it and the same problems. Since I have reinstalled it.
posted by Jackie_Treehorn at 5:59 AM on December 8, 2008

Next thing I'd do is using Process Monitor by Mark Russinovich (it combines regmon and filemon), start capturing, click on My Computer and see what happens. You may try to set the filter to show only "explorer.exe", but I'd just try to use the unfiltered output first. You may end up to browse a few hundred lines of registry/network/file access, but you'll probably find something interesting. I had similar problems with a shell extension that was left ever after uninstalling a tool, and it tried to access the network every time I right clicked. If you are overwhelmed by the output, you may want to try filtering for "failed" operations.

Unexpected pauses without cpu or disk activity usually means something is trying to access no longer existing tcp/ip or SMB addresses or resources of some kind.
posted by Nightwind at 6:39 AM on December 8, 2008

The first step is to see if this is profile dependent or machine wide. Make a new user called test. Log in as him. Do you still get the lag?

Hmm, you have a lot of drives. Do you leave any removable drives in there? Perhaps you should disable autorun and see if that helps.
posted by damn dirty ape at 6:54 AM on December 8, 2008

Response by poster: Damn Dirty Ape:

A quick answer to your drive question. I have two hard disks. One OS and one Data. One floppy, one dvd and 4 that are part of a card reader. One interesting thing that I just noticed while typing this out. The 16-in-1 card reader I have REPLACED the floppy drive on my machine, yet it is still listed in My Computer. I am wondering if this could cause a problem.

How can I get rid of the floppy drive? It isn't installed on my machine anyway.

This just might be the problem!
posted by Jackie_Treehorn at 7:44 AM on December 8, 2008

Best answer: A couple of weeks ago Mozy did an update and defaulted on a feature that places little sub-icons (green check marks or red plings) on top on your file's icons. I'm convinced there's a huge overhead when doing certain things (like opening a directory).

Try disabling that.


And do please let us know what you find out ...
posted by Xhris at 8:05 AM on December 8, 2008

Did you reboot after disconnecting the network drive? Just a suggestion on the off chance that you did not. Network drives have always been a bane in my experience...
posted by jluce50 at 8:19 AM on December 8, 2008

Response by poster: Xhris:

This was the problem. Darn that Mozy anyway. Thank you.

I'll contact Mozy today and let them know.
posted by Jackie_Treehorn at 8:28 AM on December 8, 2008

Response by poster: Contacted Mozy and didn't get any reply. Contact them again and got a notification thanking me for the information. They are working on it.
posted by Jackie_Treehorn at 6:45 AM on January 8, 2009