Slow removing history

Hi
The past few weeks when I remove internet history it takes almost a full minute. In the past it only took a few seconds.
I remove internet cookies. files and history at least once a day so the list can't be that long.
Any ideas what would be slowing it down?

I have run check disk and disk clean up, and I defrag once a month but this did not help.
Everything else seems to be running as fast as it always did.

One more thing. I have seen people being told to delete contents in the "Prefetch" folder.
What is this and is it safe to do so with out losing any programs? Some of the stuff in there is from my anti virus program.

Thanks
Geri

 

No idea why it's taking significantly longer but you might want to set the history retention period to zero days so it will be dumped when you close your browser.

Prefetch Explained in a couple of paragraphs.

 

Thanks Newt

 

You are not alone in this regard. I too have been encountering a long delay in clearing "History" recently and I have been set to 0 days retention since the beginning of time. Also have browser set to dump temp files on close. This is not limited to one machine - have been experiencing it on all of my machines and they are all squeaky clean. Standard browser cache size set to 80MB - again, something I do at setup. All IE6, no other browsers.

This behavior has been evident for roughly two weeks. I've passed it off as something related to a recent security patch but thats just my rationalization because I have no other explanation.

 

Hi All
Had to bump this back up, because now when I close my MSN browser It is taking almost a minute to close.
See when you close it, it says "Good Bye ".
When I click on the X the browser closes but it does not log off (Says Good Bye) for almost a minute after clicking the X.

Does anyone know what might be happing here?
Geri

 

The prefetch folder contains data for your programs, data that is used to load them up faster. Deleting everything in that folder is harmless, as it is repopulated as you run your system.
The reason I and others have suggested deleting the files in that folder is when we are advising to remove spy/adware, we don't want any data being loaded for bad things, even though the bad things were deleted elsewhere.

 

Thanks Mark
I'll try that and see what happens.
Geri

 

Hi Mark
Well that didn't help, still the same problem.

I went to delete my temp files in C:\windows the temp folder, Temp internet files and this is what is in there....
Content IE5, and then these....
8L6ZS1AB...each one of these has lpk files inside
CNBAOBKB
L7E7S9H4
NL2U2XVN
Index.dat

Don't know what these are or if they're safe to delete.

Geri

 

IE creates random names for the folder it uses for it's temp files.

 

Hi
Well that didn't work either, But it sure cleaned out a lot of junk.

I don't have a clue on what would be doing this?
Haven't downloaded anything, I have seen MSN Explorer do some kind of synchronization of email or other program when I log off.
Don't know what this is for sure?

Any more Ideas??
Geri

 

Did you set your history to zero days? If so, the history will be deleted when you close the browser. My guess is that you're seeing the same delay you were seeing when deleting the history manually. Try setting the history to something other than zero and see if the delay continues when you close the browser. If not, you've found the culpit. Won't be much help as you'll be right back at square one but at least you won't have the delay every time you close the browser.

 

Hi Zander
No I have it set for 1 day.

Right now I'm working long hours, as soon as I get back to normal, I'm going to call my ISP see if they can give me a clue why it's doing this.

Geri