Sometimes I feel as though I'm wading through treacle. When I click on an icon (folder or file) I recently find that it often takes ages to open. There's often an incredible delay or hiatus.

I run defrag, AVG, ZoneAlarm, and SpyBot regularly.

I suspect that at least part of the problem may be graphics? My settings are

[DISPLAY ADAPTER AND MONITOR]
NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440 with AGP8X/AGP/SSE/3DNOW! v.1.4.0
AOC Spectrum 7V 1280 x 1024 32 x 24 cm 47143 November 2001

Any comments or insights, anyone?

plonkeroo :

Extreme stab-in-the-dark:
http://www.mdgx.com/newtip1.htm
Look for "Hard Drive Thrashing". I don't really know if this is relevant, but "ShellIconCache" may (???) be a culprit...
Also look for "More Font Speed"...

Sun Java BHO perhaps. I found it interfered badly with opening of folders just as you say.

What you want to do anyway is run filemon and regmon and look at what explorer does when you launch those folders or icons.

I've searched for those files but don't seem to have them

You mean regmon and filemon? Just download them from Winternals.

Yeah.

Here :

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysintern...ies/regmon.mspx

And here :

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysintern...sk/Filemon.mspx

I took the advice and installed regmon and filemon (they are now phased out by their writer, BTW) but they're not helping, too techny for my simple brain!

Waiting for icons to open is like waiting for paint to dry.....

One of those tools will tell you were your explorer hogs when opening folders or launching apps so I'd insist a bit with them if I was you.

Most likely it will be either because of a shell extension or a BHO.

try to remove ShellIconCache, then increase icon cache, lastly rebuild ShellIconCache:

http://pubs.logicalexpressions.com/pub0009...ticle.asp?ID=56