Slowdown in opening Control Panel after recovery

[tigg]

A very good friend told me to post my problem here because you know everything.

Last week I had to recover my Windows ME system after receiving "operating system not found" and finally a missing reg file after booting up my HP computer. The computer would not boot into Safe Mode and kept telling to run scanreg to find "Enum\htree\root\0/" key. No could do so I recovered using the HP disks.

After reloading most of my programs, my ISP connection, firewall and virus scanner, running scan/disk, defragging and all I installed the critical Windows updates. Things were running well before I installed the updates. Now it takes over a full minute for my Control Panel to open. When I open msconfig and open the startup list it takes over a minute to close the page. This all began after I installed those critical Windows updates. This also occurs whether I am connected to the net or not.

This is effecting only Windows programs. All installed programs open and close without incident. If you need any more info please ask. Thanks in advance.

tigg

[liam858]

Welcome to VDr

Can you list your system specs please? Have you deleted all Temp files?


Liam

[tigg]

Windows ME 4.9.3000
256MB RAM
2GB hard Drive
IE 6.0.2800
Mcafee Desktop Firewall 8.0
Mcafee VS 7.03, engine 4400
All updates are set to manual
Internet connection - DSL

The only programs/applications that are slow to open and close are Windows applications. All other programs open and close swiftly without incident.

If you anything else please ask. tigg

[bberg]

Tigg, I have just had something very similar, although not following a recovery. Control Panel icons took an age to appear and Windows Explorer was almost unusably slow - especially the right-click menus. What puzzled me was that it seemed to be getting worse and I had ruled out the usual suspects (viruses, spyware etc). Eventually it turned out to be McAfee VirusScan - there is a thread about this problem on the McAfee Forum. As far as I can gather it occurs with a combination of Win 98 or Win ME, the 4400 scan engine and all versions of VirusScan and is due to the size of the current DAT files. McAfee are hoping that the new 5000 series scan engine which is currently in Beta will solve it. Until then, some people (myself included) have found that going into System Scan settings and turning off Outbound Scan works. The increase in speed was stunning! As an experiment, try disabling VirusScan altogether (provided you do not have an always-on Internet connection, which might leave you very vulnerable) and then, if that works, re-enable VirusScan options one by one until you find a combination that is OK.