[HELP] Explorer suddenly very slow but comes and goes?

[RipGroove]

And don't even get me started on my sound setup, I have a Soundblaster sound card to drive my DT990 250ohm headphones and low and behold there has to be the perfect balance of windows sound settings Vs sound settings within the Soundblaster software in order for it all to function properly, the best bit is, every so often after a Windows update all the windows sound settings get messed up so I have to do the whole dance again. Again that is a minefield if either software is opened because it just throws everything out of whack and stops something working.

I seem to have picked all the software that apparently just resets to default settings when you open it, I don't even have to touch anything, sometimes just opening it has that effect.

 

[RipGroove]

I mean I'm not a total idiot, I did document some of the fixes I had to implement over the years but not all of them, and it's all of those that will catch me out and give me a headache.

And of course a reformat might not even sort it.

I did actually think of clearing a spare SSD and dual booting just to see if the issue was still present then maybe slowly moving everything over to that installation or once knowing that a clean installation would solve the problem just go ahead and reformat my m.2 but dual booting isn't something I've done before so that alone would be a headache to sort out.

 

[Rroff]

every so often after a Windows update all the windows sound settings get messed up so I have to do the whole dance again

Actually something that annoys me a lot - fortunately the last time it happened it wasn't my setup that woke the whole house at 2-3am when an unattended update changed audio settings overnight resulting in lots of noise coming out their speakers instead of headphones.

I'm not confident a reinstall will solve this problem though as I've mentioned before I've got a couple of systems where this creeps in on Windows 10 anywhere from days to a couple of months or so after a fresh install and I've never got to the bottom of it. Albeit they are older systems one being a Q9550 (Core 2 Quad) based system (IIRC I swapped out everything, CPU, RAM, storage, etc., bar the motherboard at one point on that system and it would still come back eventually).

 

[RipGroove]

Actually something that annoys me a lot - fortunately the last time it happened it wasn't my setup that woke the whole house at 2-3am when an unattended update changed audio settings overnight resulting in lots of noise coming out their speakers instead of headphones.

I'm not confident a reinstall will solve this problem though as I've mentioned before I've got a couple of systems where this creeps in on Windows 10 anywhere from days to a couple of months or so after a fresh install and I've never got to the bottom of it. Albeit they are older systems one being a Q9550 (Core 2 Quad) based system.

The sound thing is very annoying! I'll try the shell extensions thing and see if I can find the culprit for now before taking the nuclear option.

 

[RipGroove]

This kind of slowness is often caused by bad shell extensions. You can use something like https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/autoruns to show what you have configured at the moment, then you could work through disabling them one at a time until you find the problem one.

Edit: I see you mentioned you already tried this with ShellExView so I don’t think Autoruns will reveal anymore.

I started off by hiding all Microsoft Entries as I'm thinking it is more likely to be a third party entry and just systematically disabling each one of the items under the 'Explorer' tab, most things in there were either Context Menu Handlers or Drag & Drop Handlers which seemed a logical place to start given my symptoms but no luck so far. I assume I don't have to reboot Windows after disabling each entry? At least in that section the disabling took immediate effect for example after disabling a WinZip Context Menu Handler I could see right away that it was gone without having to reboot. But I was going to tackle the entries under the 'Logon' tab but wondering if these entries will require a reboot? If that's the case this is going to take forever as I have lot of entries under both the 'Services' & 'Drivers' tab as well as all the other tabs, and of course the Microsoft tabs as well if the problem does not show itself after ruling out all third party entries.

 

[andshrew]

I started off by hiding all Microsoft Entries as I'm thinking it is more likely to be a third party entry and just systematically disabling each one of the items under the 'Explorer' tab, most things in there were either Context Menu Handlers or Drag & Drop Handlers which seemed a logical place to start given my symptoms but no luck so far. I assume I don't have to reboot Windows after disabling each entry? At least in that section the disabling took immediate effect for example after disabling a WinZip Context Menu Handler I could see right away that it was gone without having to reboot. But I was going to tackle the entries under the 'Logon' tab but wondering if these entries will require a reboot? If that's the case this is going to take forever as I have lot of entries under both the 'Services' & 'Drivers' tab as well as all the other tabs, and of course the Microsoft tabs as well if the problem does not show itself after ruling out all third party entries.

For the logon stuff you could just manually kill the processes it says are being launched on logon, otherwise you’d have to at least log off and back on again to see the difference.

Another alternative - especially if the issue is only intermittent - would be to create a process monitor capture when it’s happening. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procmon So you would start a capture, right click and once it finishes loading stop the capture. It’s going to capture a huge amount of information but you could filter on explorer.exe and exclude success entries and if you’re lucky it might narrow it down to what is taking so long.

 

[RipGroove]

For the logon stuff you could just manually kill the processes it says are being launched on logon, otherwise you’d have to at least log off and back on again to see the difference.

Another alternative - especially if the issue is only intermittent - would be to create a process monitor capture when it’s happening. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procmon So you would start a capture, right click and once it finishes loading stop the capture. It’s going to capture a huge amount of information but you could filter on explorer.exe and exclude success entries and if you’re lucky it might narrow it down to what is taking so long.

Thanks. The issue has moved from intermittent to all of the time now.

 

[RipGroove]

New CPU and motherboard on the way which means a fresh Windows install so hopefully that'll sort it.

 

[RipGroove]

This seems to be fixed now, I started uninstalling some programs the other day for no reason really other than I'm replacing the CPU and Mobo at the weekend (still not really sure why I started removing programs because I'm going to format the C-Drive anyway for a totally fresh start). Over the space of a couple of days I removed a few and the problem persisted but after booting up today its gone so I'm not sure exactly which programs I removed but I do know that the ones listed below were definitely removed:

Vegas Pro 13
Vegas Pro 17
Lightroom
Handbrake
Epic Launcher
Uplay Launcher

There were probably some others but I wasn't really keeping track in regards to the issue in my OP because I was going nuclear on it anyway. My best guess if I had to pick something on that list would be Lightroom maybe as that has a pretty convoluted file system.

Weirdly though yesterday I ran DDU on my video card drivers in Sfae-Mode and installed a new GPU (3090FE) with latest drivers, I was going to wait until I replaced the CPU/mobo at the weekend but the GPU arrived and I was curious how such a hardcore GPU would work with an older CPU so installed it for fun and ran a benchmark and played BFV for a bit. I can't really see how that would have anything to do with it but I finished uninstalling programs on Sunday and didn't notice that my issue had gone and did the video card yesterday and suddenly my issue is fixed today??!!

Weird.

 

[darael]

After taking a complete image with Macrium Reflect, I like to work my way through the installed programs list before reinstalling to help refresh my memory about any files or settings I need to backup for that program. So I can understand your reasoning for uninstalling things one at a time - especially when you've nothing to lose.

Reinstall each program one at a time and see when the problem returns. It's a bit of a pain, but it might be your only way.

 

[RipGroove]

After taking a complete image with Macrium Reflect, I like to work my way through the installed programs list before reinstalling to help refresh my memory about any files or settings I need to backup for that program. So I can understand your reasoning for uninstalling things one at a time - especially when you've nothing to lose.

Reinstall each program one at a time and see when the problem returns. It's a bit of a pain, but it might be your only way.

Well the problem vanished after I installed a new Mobo and CPU and a fresh install of Windows, I've not reinstalled all the programs I had on there before yet but I am keeping track of what gets installed and when so that if the problem comes back I'll have a good idea what caused it, assuming it was a program.