Boy is this frustrating. Just got a new custom built PC and before I describe the problem, here are the details of the system:
Asus P5wdh motherboard
Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 (2.13GHz)
2 Gb of 800MHz DDR-2 RAM
Seagate 7200 80Gb SATAII HD
Seagate 7200 320Gb SATAII HD
GeForce 7600GT video card
Creative X-Fi sound card
MSI THeater 550 Pro TV Tuner PCI
Win XP Pro with SP2
Anyway, I just connected this PC and to my great dismay, there is a 30 second lag every time files are double-clicked or right-clicked from windows explorer. The hardrives and CPU are quiet during the lag.
I have a call in to the support folks but I expect they won’t reply until after the holiday. I found this googling around. It sounded promising but I checked my system and Verclsid.exe is not active during the lag. Furthermore, the KB908531 update is not on the system. Just in case, though, I renamed verclsid.exe located in windows/system32 to verclsid.old without resolution of the lag.
I also tried updating the Nvidia driver but no newer updates were available (the driver on my system is dated 8/8/06).
Thanks. I found the article after posting the thread. I started with “Method 2.” It was ineffective even with disabling ALL context menu handlers (including the microsoft context menu handlers). So I tried “Method 1.” It was scary and all tackling the registry. Deleting the entries under “HKCR *\shellex\contextmenuhandlers” one at a time was ineffective. Deleting all entries resolved the lag issue completely. The only side effect I noted was that my AVG shell extension was unhappy. I restored only the AVG line and the lag did not return. So for now I’m good but I’m wondering what the four lines I didn’t restore do and when this will come back to haunt me. FTR, I have a backup copy that I could restore if necessary.
Below are the deleted registry entries (including the AVG entry which I restored):
The video card driver is extremely unlikely to be the culprit, but there are at least two driver releases newer than August. Here’s the current one: NVidia Web Site. It’s geneally a good idea with nVidia cards just to use the reference drivers from the nVidia web site, rather than from your card manufacturer, because they lag the release, sometimes by half a year or more. In fact, what made me check your driver was the four-month-old date – I’ve never seen nVidia not release a driver in that long.
Next, go to start->run, enter “msconfig” and hit enter. This brings up a little tool that is invaluable for diagnosing these sorts of errors (by which I mean your long lag). Turn everything off and restart – see if the problem goes away. If it doesn’t; reformat the drive and re-install everything. If it does (and it probably will), you’re in for a long evening of binary-searching: turn on half the stuff, note the state of the system, and refine until you discover the culprit.
Remember that XP shows you the desktop LONG before it’s ready to actually start accepting inputs, so you’ll need to give the machine at least 2-3 minutes to “settle” after each reboot before you’ll be able to tell if the problem has gone away or not. (Vista’s better in this regard, but then wastes all of the saved time by asking you “are you sure? this could be a security risk!” whenever you want to do anything.)