Over the last few days my P4 2.8 has become very erratic.
Some times, right-click context menus take about 10 seconds
to open. Same goes for file deletion. The explorer window freezes
a frustratingly long while before doing what it's supposed to.
The HDD either appears to be doing nothing, or sometimes it
reads for 10 secs, which is ridiculous for a Seagate 8mb cache 7200rpm
HDD...

Tuesday, all was fine. Since then I've only installed, and subsequently
uninstalled the Alcohol 120 trial (didn't like it so much since Daemon Tools
are just as good for drive emulation and cost nothing). Uninstallation
did not remove many registry keys, so I decided to play it safe and
used System Restore to revert my PC to the state it was in on Tuesday.
Unfortunately this did not solve it.

I have defragmented my disk, I have erased all temp files. What else
can I do?

What could be the root of this evil? If I have to format again I'll shoot myself.

Have you checked your task manager to see what (if any) processes are consuming heavy CPU resources (high CPU usage)?

That often turns up a clue.

Expired Certs Cause Headaches - Mystery slowdowns have logical cause

Verisign Certificate Expiration Causes Multiple Problems

VeriSign's dead certificates 'knocked out Norton'

And finally..
VeriSign Root Certificate Authority Update

Thanks 4 da linx Citay.
How an SSL certificate can affect offline tasks confuses me a bit though...

BTW, I'dd like to add that CPU usage is very low
and memory usage is between 200MB~300MB out of a total of
1024MB.

There are no processes taking up insane cpu time, except for
Avantbrowser which crashes periodically . However there
are some processes which are active all the time though they can't
be removed from the start-up list 'cos they r not even in there,
for instance Creative Audigy 2 software and 2 MATLAB processes (?)
Some processes I've never seen (e.g. aHTTP.exe) and of course
there's always the beloved msmsgr.exe which pisses me off immensely.
Can u have MSN Messenger without Windows Messenger?

Finally, I've found no viruses and no spyware bar the occasional tracking
cookie...

Start -> Run -> RunDll32 advpack.dll,LaunchINFSection %windir%\INF\msmsgs.inf,BLC.Remove

Is it safe to substitute "msmsgs.inf" with, say, "oe060.inf" (or something like that) if I want to remove Outlook Express?

You could also just remove it in Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel.

Installed the certificate, but my PC still takes eons to open right-click context
menus... There must be sth else wrong, or didn't import the certificate
correctly...

Are you using Win98 (don't think so cause you used System Restore....)??? Every Win98 system I have ever used (even fresh installs) suffers from these symptoms when you delete a large number of files in Explorer. Otherwise, could you run the program found at http://mjc1.com/mirror/hjt/ and post the results here? PLEASE be careful and dont delete any of the files that it finds before posting the log....most of them are ligit and you can break your system.

Usin' XP...

When I installed the certificate I let the installer define the
installation location automatically. Am I supposed to set
a location manually?

ahttp.exe is the avantbrowser



Turn off the Windows Messenger service. There's no reason to have windows messenger active unless you like spam popups.

I had the same issue like yourtallness, I guess the problem was that I had WinXP SP2 beta installed lately and removed it. Something maybe was leftover that makes explorer.exe (the filebrowser) crawl.

I removed WinRAR explorer shell extension (unzip here...) and updated that certificate, too because I have Norton antivirus with shell extension (scan this file). Now its all fine again, dunno which of the two was the culprit, if any. hope that helps

I had a similar problem some time ago whereby WinXP would inexplicably freeze, especially if I was alt tabbing or using a menu, and I mean it would FREEZE, requireing a hard reset. Once I left it on for over 12 hours and it didnt come out of it. I formatted and reinstalled three times before this nonsense stopped.

If u r talking about the 'Messenger' service in services.msc,
well Windows claims it has nothing to do with Windows Messenger
(if u check the properties of this service)...




Where did u install the certificate to? The default location or did u specify one
manually? I've read the .pdf that explains the procedure, but it wasn't helpful
'cos I didn't get the same screens while installing, dunno why...

I've had similar extreme slowdowns happen to on my computer irregularly (seldomly). Everything goes to a crawl, as if WinXP is running on a 386 with 2mb ram. It is a few months ago since it started.
Since its impossible to pinpoint (happens seldomly and irregularly) i'm shit out of luck , Have tried disabling everything at bootup, run Spybot, have firewall On/Off, Reinstall Norton AV, uninstall norton AV, etc, etc. No luck. So for now I just live with the #&%&# every few weeks.

A reboot fixes the problem though.

Any ideas?

I have the same kind of set up/problems, it turned out that my HDD was pretty full. So after I cleared out some space, the lag went away. Might want to check for huge TMP files, and clear out some other stuff that you don't need. It helped me.

You can turn off unneeded services in Windows XP, search Google for "Black Viper" (excluding the quotation marks).

Yeah, I've used Black Viper's guidelines b4...
Thing is, my PC has had faster days, even with all the
default services running. Thus it cannot be a matter of
services.

Btw, I haven't had right-click menu delay for quite a few days .

Does this only happen with multimedia files (AVI, MP3 and such)?

WinXP tries to open a preview window of recognized multimedia formats, which could take a very long time depending on the file size.

Especially incomplete AVI files cause a lot of problems for WinXP, because the preview window hangs each time you click at an AVI file.

If yes, the solution is to disable the preview window. This requires a bit of registry teaking.

Nope, that's not the case...

It's been doin' it again! Bugger!
15 seconds to open a "delete" dialogue for a flippin' 1 KB text file...

I'll be a smartass and say: Reinstall!

Smartass

That was fast!

This happens to me AFTER I reinstalled.
I get slowdowns like that at times, although WinXP boots really fast now.

Mozilla made my PC really slow when I enabled quick launch. Each time I closed mozilla, it wanted to add it to memory again which took a few seconds. In these few seconds my PC was very slow. Now that I have disabled it, things are looking better.

Maybe you have the same thing going on ???

Nope, not the case either...