Extremely Slow Windows Explorer

[falcon2000]

This has never happened with all of the Windows OSes I have used before (95, 98, 98SE, ME, NT, 2000 Pro.)

When I open a folder (any folder) with Windows Exporer it takes a painfully long time.

I am pretty sure it's NOT a low resources issue b/c it takes a long time even if I have no program opened (except those very few running in the background.)

I have got 512 MB of Ram in this box running a PIII 900MHz.

Using other programs to explore folders do not take time at all. Just when using Windows Explorer that it's a crawl.

Any idea.

[falcon2000]

^^bump^^

[ProfessorU]

You could try the 'launch folder windows in a separate process' option in the tools>options menu. I think that's where it is, anyway. I'm not on an XP machine right now so I can't check.

This will allow multiple instances of explorer.exe, which means that if the system explorer is having problems, your file browsing explorer won't necessarily have them too.

[John Steven]

Hi falcon2000,

This happened to me just a few months ago and VDR help me out at the following thread;

http://discussions.virtualdr.com/sho...&postid=520488

Just noticed that you're using XP - don't know if this will work in XP so back up your Registry

Hope this helps.................

[falcon2000]

No, it doesn't work.

Windows Explorer is slow on opening all folders not just shared folders. But I did try your suggestions but it didn't improve anything.

However, I experimented on turning on Indexing Service (previously set on manual) and it did help but only a noticable little.
Any more idea?

[John Steven]

Sorry it didn't work......

[ProfessorU]

Maybe a repair is in order. That would be my next course of action.

John Steven... that might be the coolest avatar I've seen yet.

[John Steven]

Thanks ProfessorU,

My wife doesn't think it's so cool (LOL)..........

[falcon2000]

ProfessorU,

Not sure a Repair will help b/c I have this problem with Windows Explorer since day one it was insatlled (clean install with SP1 right after.)

[ProfessorU]

Yesterday I created a fresh install of win2000 and I could dial up with a modem and I couldn't get any data from any website. All my settings were right, and all the hardware worked. I spent 30 minutes on the phone with my ISP and we got nowhere.
I reinstalled win2k and suddenly everything worked fine. I have no idea what was wrong, but it probably happened during the install.
So I guess I'm saying that from my own experience, a repair might still work.
Also, the 'launch folder windows in a separate process' option really does make things go faster on my machine.

[falcon2000]

ProfessorU,

I tried the "'launch folder windows in a separate process" option and it doesn't make any difference.

Actually, I have dug deeper into this further and I found that I need to ammend my question quite a bit.

Ok, on my data drive I have mostly (99%) folders of images files. Half of them are TIFF files and half of them are JPEG files. The TIFF files are typically much bigger than the JPEG files.

The strangest thing is that Windows Explorer seems to operate in normal speed when accessing the folders with the large TIFF files but slow to crwal when accessing the folders with the smaller JPEG files!

Any idea?

Since my question has changed so much I feel I should open uo a new thread instead. Please continue at this thread.

[chorro]

have you tried defragging your harddrive to see if that helps?? Using Diskeeper 7 or PerfectDisk really helps instead of using XP's default defrag utility.

[falcon2000]

I defrage regularly but no help.

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