How to diagnose right-click menu slowness?

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Is there a way to find specifically what's causing Windows 7 explorer slowness, like right-click menu delay and even opening new explorer windows/drives/folders?

  • Slowness when opening new explorer windows
  • Slowness when right-clicking files/folders
  • A "waiting" mouse cursor pops on and off rapidly before a drive/folder's contents is displayed (I'm guessing this might indicate some kind of shell extension(s) being loaded)
  • When right-click something, sometimes the appears decently quick, but if I right-click something else soon after, I'll get a 5-10 second wait

And ideally, being able to trace slowness down to a specific program/service/extension without just randomly uninstalling context menu extensions.

Coldblackice

Posted 2014-03-03T18:13:42.437

Reputation: 4 774

3CCleaner has a "Context Menu" tab in its Startup options now that you can use to look at, enable, or disable context menu items. – LawrenceC – 2014-03-03T18:49:01.827

Answers

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I believe that not there is an application that diagnoses what you want, what you can do is disable each menu item to find out what is causing the slowness.

Update

Looks like I was wrong, yes there is a program to diagnose the slowness, the program is Debug Diagnostics Tool

The DebugDiag tool is designed to assist in troubleshooting issues such as hangs, slow performance, memory leaks or memory fragmentation, and crashes in any user-mode process...

For exampleShellExView should work for you.

enter image description here

This utility works on any version of Windows, starting from Windows 98 and up to Windows 7. x64 versions of Windows are also supported.

stderr

Posted 2014-03-03T18:13:42.437

Reputation: 9 300

2Just like to add that I still had this issue in Windows 10. ShellExView worked fine and allowed me to disable menus until I found which one was causing the lag. (It seems that graphics driver context menu's are the biggest culprit, my problem was cured by disabling the Intel graphics menu TheDeskTopContextMenu Class) – sergeantKK – 2015-08-19T10:17:55.200

Thanks for the answer, stderr. And thanks for the update @sergeantKK. – Coldblackice – 2019-07-09T05:42:02.590

Asked: 2014-03-03T18:13:42.437

Viewed: 1 398 times

Active: 2016-01-07T10:47:06.363