I’ve had this problem for almost the last full year. Something – almost certainly malware – is slowing down one of my computers awfully, but intermittently. I’ll go for a month or so without seeing it, then it slows one of my XP Pro systems to a dead-slow crawl.
The symptom I’m seeing is that if I double-click a document or app or I click on the Start button, I’ll see no response for about 2-3 minutes.
What puzzles me most is just how it’s doing that! There’s very little disk I/O activity, no Internet I/O activity, and the Task Manager display shows that the System Idle Process is almost always getting 99% of the CPU activity. So what’s left that could possibly slow down my system?
I’ve run Avira Anti-Vir Premium and PCTools SpyWare Doctor, but I had to run them in Safe Mode if they were ever going to finish. They both found infections and quarantined them. But they both recommend running again in normal mode, and I started the SpyWare doctor (an excellent tool) three days ago and it’s still only 26% complete after all this time!
I’m open to any suggestions, but the question in bold is the real puzzler. How can this be happening?
Bad hard drive? When my hard drive was going on me, it gradually became very, very slow. Scandisk showed no problems, and all the things to speed up your system, like registry cleaning, or defragging, had no effect. Got a new hard drive, and it was like a new computer.
This happens to me regularly. In my case the culplrit is no free RAM - usually a process in firefox, outlook or similar has grabbed all the free RAM and the systems crawls until I release some by closing the prog in question. Answer add another Gb and it may improve
Did you do an exact copy of your old disk to your new one? In other words, are you certain you did not have some malware on the old system that only disappeared when you switched to a new hard drive?
Because there’s one fact I should emphasize that I hadn’t yet: the system runs far faster in Safe Mode than it does in normal mode. That would seem to leave out the disk drive as the culprit.
Hmmm… Well, I’ve got 2 GB of RAM in that system, and the problem shows up immediately upon booting into normal mode; i.e., with no apps running save, say, notepad, where it takes many seconds for any characters to appear.
Some times the document becomes corrupted and that really slows down opening a document, while the program tries everything it can to open it. A deleting of the original file and saving a new one in it’s place has solved the problem for me sometimes. obviously if you keep a lot of backups you could copy over one that wasn’t corrupted. Still delete the bad one before the copy.
There are many things that could be wrong, this is my contribution of what it could be.
On a tangent to this, a critical windows file could have been corrupted. I had explorer.exe corrupt on me back in sept 07. It wasn’t enough to keep it from working, but it was enough to slow everything to a crawl. Ended up having to a fresh install of windows to fix it.
Heavens no! I can’t understand why those hideous monsters are so popular. I use Avira AntiVir Premium which is rated quite high and PCTools SpyWare Doctor (as well as some of the popular freeware malware fighters).
Thanks for the tip. But in my case, it’s immediately slow right after booting. Even launching Firefox takes 15-20 minutes, so I never bother. The test I use is to simply launch Notebook.exe alone, which takes 3-6 minutes to load in normal mode, but about a second or two under Safe Mode. Then I type into it and see it take seconds to simply echo a character under normal mode, but immediately under Safe Mode.
The Task Manager shows there are no other apps running, and the CPU load display almost always shows that the System Idle Process is almost always getting 99% of the CPU activity.
Thanks for your contribution, Harmonious Discord. But this happens whether I open an existing document or create a new one. Notepad.exe and Wordpad.exe and UltraEdit 14 all take several minutes to create a new document in normal mode, while it’s very fast under Safe Mode.
Something like that would seem to fit the symptoms. It would have to be some system file that runs in normal mode but not in Safe Mode, but there’s plenty of those. I don’t think Explorer would fit, but some other important system file might be corrupted. I can’t think of how that corruption could produce such a slow-down without showing any significant I/O or CPU activity, but as a programmer, I’ve run into stranger things.
The last time this happened, I performed a “recovery install” (is that the name? I forget). It didn’t make any difference, so if it was a system file, it was not replaced during that special install process.
Any suggestions on how to identify the culprit other than a brute force re-install from scratch? (Damn, how I hate to re-install 100 apps after that!)
I had similar issue with my XP box at home. There were times where it took 5 minutes to get a new tab in Firefox.
I bought a registry cleaning utility, and turned it loose. There were something like 1200 issues it found. I made a full back up of my registry, and hit the fix button.
It was like a new computer about 10 minutes later.
FTR I used Uniblu Registry Booster
I think you’d be surprised at what can cause this. I also wouldn’t be so sure it’s malware.
The fact that it doesn’t happen in safe mode makes me suspect you have some other crap running (again, not necessarily malware) that is interfering somehow. So I would go and kill processes systematically and see if any of them are the culprit.
Another thing I might try is to use a utility like handle while the hang is occuring. Use it on the file that you tried to open that triggered the hang condition. It may just tell you about some unexpected process that is trying to access it.
Is this only after you turn the machine on or can it start at any time?
If the former then you have something that’s starting and waiting to finish. Eventually it times out and you can then use your machine. It’s either a service or an autostart app. You need to look in the Event Viewer and see which services are failing (red icon). Run msconfig to see your autostart apps.
Try running Blacklight or one of the other free root kit detectors. If something is intercepting processes you’ll never find them with standard anti-virus or spyware tools.
