Right click taking forever to show the menu

McGraw · 07-04-2005, 11:59

Recently, one by one, the PCs at my work are starting to take an age to respond to right clicks for properties etc.

One of them goes to hourglass for minutes at a time and then does nothing.

All of them have XP and are virus and spyware free.

Recently we have switched over to a domain but my machine was doing it before and the they still behave like this when detached from the domain and put back in the workgroup.

It happens with local files on my machine but not files that are on our server. Other pcs are slow on both. At the moment, the server is another XP pc that is just storing the files.

We have not gone fully live on the domain yet.

Thanks for any help.

zoombini · 07-04-2005, 15:33

Is the HDD full?
IE cache got the last few years worth in?
Temp folder got a gb of files in?

They might make it damn slow.

MadGamer · 07-04-2005, 17:15

Do they all run from a server? Have you got Admin rights? If so then do a defrag.

07-04-2005, 18:01

Do you have any persistant drive mappings? If so, are the mappings still valid now you have moved to a domain? Are the names of the PCs hosting the mapped drives resolving? (DNS or WINS). I have had a similar problem in the past, but am not sure what I did to stop it!

Raistlin · 07-04-2005, 18:10

Sounds like something persistent in the Context menu is causing problems.

Check for software entries which might be causing problems, or entries in the Send To part of the menu which might no longer be valid (or properly resolving).

McGraw · 07-04-2005, 21:11

It's really weird.

Word documents seem to be causing it.

Sometimes after one pause they go back to normal speed, sometimes there's a pause every time.

No other files do it at the moment but I'm sure they did in the past?

Raistlin · 07-04-2005, 23:09

Is it only when you right click within Word?

Flubflow · 07-04-2005, 23:59

http://windowsxp.mvps.org/rcdelay.htm

http://windowsxp.mvps.org/slowrightclick.htm

McGraw · 08-04-2005, 08:44

Yes, it's only Word so I will just avoid right clicking Word docs.

Thanks for the links. I've already read them and decided against following their advice.

Looks like far too much time and effort. I'll just do a clean install over the next few days.

Flubflow · 08-04-2005, 11:17

Last year there were lots of people having this problem and bizarrely enough it turned out to be to do with a root certificates file (apparently users of Norton Anti-Virus were most commonly affected).
Don't ask my why but once these people had updated the Root Certificates from Verisign the slow right click problem went away. I dunno whether it is worth checking.
You might find some more info by googling in that subject.