Weird Windows Explorer Delay

I sure have been getting some terrific help from you all lately, and now I have another question:

After I boot up, the very first time I open Window's Explorer and click on a folder I want to open, there's a 15 second delay (hourglass visible) before it actually opens the selected folder.

Thereafter, any time I click on a folder, it opens immediately. It's only the first use of Explorer after a reboot where I see this 15 second delay.

It's almost as if the program is trying to get an initial "grasp" of all the folder data on my drive. But once it does, then it's fine.

Does anyone know what's causing this delay?

BTW, I've got an 80 GB drive divided into four partitions -- C (45 GB), and then D, E and F (with 9.75 GB each). My system is a Dell Dimension 4500 with 1 GB of RAM, and is very lean and mean in terms of having as few startup programs and services running at boot as possible.

 

Thanks for the suggestion Steve. I removed iconcache.db as you suggested -- in fact, I removed iconcache from all four of my user profiles, one of them 18 MB in size -- but I still have that initial 15 second delay.

Any other ideas?

P.S. I searched the MS Knowledgebase for delay +explorer and found this article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/873414/en-us

I'm not sure it speaks to my problem, though, because the initial delay (i.e., only the first time I use Explorer after a reboot) occurs no matter what folder or drive (partition) I try to open.

What do you think?

 

Hi Dave,

It could be that a 3rd party shell extension is causing this. Most of the time, a problem with a 3rd party shell extension causes explorer crashes, but this could be another symptom: http://www.helpwithwindows.com/techfiles/explorer-crashes.html

To test, using the Shell view app, you could disable them one by one. The non MS ones are highlighted. Right clicking on a line brings up a menu of options.

Regards - Charles

 

Hey Charles, I followed your suggestion and disabled all 3rd party shell extensions but nothing changed.

Interestingly, when I launch Windows Explorer, it's the application itself that takes 15-20 seconds after it opens to fully display the panes.

While it's taking the time to do that, task manager shows basically no CPU usage but I can hear the hard drive percolating like mad.

If I immediately try to open a folder, it hangs. But if I wait the full 20 seconds after launch, or until the hard disk stops buzzing, then the folder opens right away.

Anyway, here's my launch command (in the target box of the icon's properties):

%SystemRoot%\explorer.exe /e,C:\Documents and Settings\David Kline.DKLINE\My Documents

Could it be that the explorer app just takes a long time to open -- or that it needs to scan across the whole drive before displaying all the folders?

All I know is, it didn't used to take this long. Only about the same time that I started saving large digital video files did this delay after launch begin.

Also strange is that the second or third (or fourth, etc.) time that I launch explorer, there is none of this delay. It only occurs right after a reboot, during my first launch of Explorer.

 

Hello Dave,

Mine only has %SystemRoot%\explorer.exe, which is what I might expect it to be. You could copy the current "target" to a txt document and try the shortened version.

Other things you could look at are running Error Checking (chkdsk), see Help and Support or defragmentation (although I think you have already run defrag and a thorough disk cleanup in your other thread).

It could be that your security system (antivirus/antispyware) is running a check because something is accessing the file system.

Matt