Evil Slow Explorer
So…
I had this problem on my old laptop, and then I replaced my laptop, and shortly afterward it began happening here as well. It’s fine at work, but when I’m in a remote location and connected to the network, the thing takes FOREVER when I right click on icons or hit delete on an icon in explorer, go to open a zip file, etc. I troubleshot this for a while and detected network access whenever I did this, it tried to connect back to our domain controller named STARGATE on 10.0.0.1 - so I was under the impression I had some bad shell extension that was trying to access the domain controller for permissions or something.
So I’m working tonight and it’s PAINFUL and I’m like wtf is going on here, so I go through Software\Classes\Applications in the registry, where the shell extensions are, and I find this extension for a program called GSpot, which is a program to tell you what kind of CODECS a multimedia file uses. Anyhow, it’s a program on the W:\ drive, which is mapped to a share on STARGATE and even though I never ever told it to install shell extensions, it went ahead and did that and pointed it to W:\ where I ran the program from. So basically every time I right clicked on an icon, etc, it was going out to the W drive to try to load this shell extension.
Wow, that was painful.
Now my right-clicks are almost INSTANT. I’ve verified that this happens by re-running GSpot - it immediately creates the offending shell extension, without prompting. Thank you GSpot, for making my life hell for months, without ever ASKING me if you could do so.
BTW, GSpot is an EXCELLENT program otherwise. It’s available here, just never run it from anywhere other than your local hard drive.