When I open the Windows Explorer in Win98SE, and roaming from one folder to the others in the Explorer Bar, it will take longer and longer time to display the contents of the folder in Details View at the right panel. Closing and reopening the Windows Explorer does not help at all. Only reboot will bring the speed of Windows Explorer back to normal, but as we start to move from one folder to the others, Windows Explorer is getting slower and slower again.

I was thinking on some sort of memory leak, but the System Monitor shows that I still have more than 170 MByte of unused physical memory, and Swapfile in use is 0 MByte.

Does anyone experience this kind of problem and found a solution to it?

Some weeks ago (when I used 98 - now I use 2000, my favorite windows) I had a very annoying slowdown problem. In fact, after moving some folders and/or files, every operation in explorer (except browsing though folders, but it can happen) started takin so much time that it seemed that the system hung. I found out that this problem is related to Internet Explorer 6.0 and higher. The solution is to copy browseui.dll and browselc.dll from Internet Explorer 5.5 to Windows\system folder in DOS mode
For details, go to Windows 98 hangs or locks up when deleting files

Thanks to alexanrs.
Unfortunately replacing BROWSELC.DLL and BROWSEUI.DLL from IE 5.5 does not solve my problem.
I have the feeling whenever I click a folder, the contents of that folder is somehow kept in sort of cache memory, it is apparent from the fact that when we reopen a folder that has been opened before, then it is quite fast. But when we click from one folder to the other, that cache memory is somehow getting full.
Any other suggestion?

Have you tried defragging and running registry check? You should also keep your drives less than about 90% full.

get rid of unneeded namespaces in the registry....treying to fin the unneeded keys now...

here's one of you don't use webfolders.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\MyComputer\NameSpace

another...if u don't use scheduled tasks

;--------------------------------------------------------------
;Speed up Network Browsing by removing Network Scheduled Tasks
;--------------------------------------------------------------

[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\RemoteComputer\NameSpace\{D6277990-4C6A-11CF-8D87-00AA0060F5BF}]

Does this occur in Safe Mode too?

have you tweaked the name, path, and icon caches?

cacheman is an easy way to do it if you haven't

also instal sesp2.02 to fix glitches in the os

good luck!

Thank you all for the kind effort to help.
As a Win98SE enthusiast, I always do the best I can to maintain it, including but not limited to regularly run defragging (Diskeeper Lite) and Regclean, all the Windows security and system updates, many optimization tweak, like getting rid of NameSpace mentioned in the registry.
Just now I tried under the safe mode, the result is the same, the longer we work with Windows Explorer, moving (opening) from one folder to the other, the slower it will be.
I am almost convinced, it must be sort of memory leak, Windows Explorer must be keeping the contents of the folders in some cache memory, the problem is we don't know how to possibly control it.

Kill and restart explorer with Explorestart for example when this happens.

See as well my off topic posts in this thread

To dramatically reduce the need to resort to the above :

Unregister webcheck.dll if you don't use active desktop. Type in the run box : regsvr32 /u webcheck.dll and press enter.

Other tips :

Tweak the directory and file cache to the max.

Don't use the conservative swap file usage tweak. Twice the size of the Ram is said to be the best for the swap. That's what I use but haven't tested other values. Best location of the swap depends on how many drives, partitions you have. If you have, say, three hard drives, you may want to locate it on its own on a separate partition of your OS drive so you can benefit from maximun speed transfer between the two other drives.

Have a good background memory manager running that autorecover your lost Ram such as Ram Idle LE.

And you should be allright.

As well, disable antivirus background scanning if any when just copying and moving either large files or large amount of files.


I sometimes use this file to clean some caches in the registry :


And I use RegSeeker as my automatic registry cleaning engine. I find it is the best. You may want to give it a try.