Windows 7 – How to Diagnose Right-Click Menu Slowness

context menuperformancetroubleshootingwindows 7windows-explorer

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.

Best Answer

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.

Related Solutions

Windows – Shell extension to unblock downloaded files

There's a tool from Sysinternals called streams.

This page describes how to use it. It doesn't add an option to the context menu, but does allow you to unblock a number of files at once.

I've also found this post which gives a registry file that will do the trick:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\runas]
@="Take Ownership"
"NoWorkingDirectory"=""

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\runas\command]
@="cmd.exe /c takeown /f \"%1\" && icacls \"%1\" /grant administrators:F"
"IsolatedCommand"="cmd.exe /c takeown /f \"%1\" && icacls \"%1\" /grant administrators:F"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\runas]
@="Take Ownership"
"NoWorkingDirectory"=""

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\runas\command]
@="cmd.exe /c takeown /f \"%1\" /r /d y && icacls \"%1\" /grant administrators:F /t"
"IsolatedCommand"="cmd.exe /c takeown /f \"%1\" /r /d y && icacls \"%1\" /grant administrators:F /t"

which is probably closer to what you want. Copy it into Notepad, save it as something.reg on your desktop, and double click to add it to your registry.

Windows – Menu New → Text document is missing when not administrator in Windows 7

I found several references to solutions to this problem. They all involve registry hacks -- most suggest to add some new entries to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT or HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Classes/ (which I believe are equivalent).

Specifically, the following reg hack seems to solve the problem for most folks:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.txt]
@="txtfile"
"Content Type"="text/plain"
"PerceivedType"="text"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.txt\PersistentHandler]
@="{5e941d80-bf96-11cd-b579-08002b30bfeb}"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.txt\ShellNew]
"ItemName"="@%SystemRoot%\system32\notepad.exe,-470"
"NullFile"=""

Cut and paste into a new .reg file to auto-merge it into your registry. I recommend first checking each of the values/keys shown here in regedit to see what changes (if any) you are making.

However, this did not work for me, as I had a conflicting empty entry in HKEY_CURRENT_USER. In fact, the keys/values were all already in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT, so the first set of changes didn't do squat. So... I also merged in an identical version of this using HKEY_CURRENT_USER, which worked:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\.txt]
"PerceivedType"="text"
@="txtfile"
"Content Type"="text/plain"

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\.txt\PersistentHandler]
@="{5e941d80-bf96-11cd-b579-08002b30bfeb}"

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\.txt\ShellNew]
"ItemName"="@%SystemRoot%\system32\notepad.exe,-470"
"NullFile"=""

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Windows – Shell extension to unblock downloaded files

Windows – Menu New → Text document is missing when not administrator in Windows 7

Related Question