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When navigating or moving files around in Windows Explorer, there is a significant delay before any operation completes. For example, when I rename a folder, sometimes there is a 1-2 second delay before the "edit name" view disappears and folder is successfully renamed.

This happens for both hard drives that I have installed.

Interestingly, the problem seems to be specific to Windows Explorer. If I create folders in Adobe Bridge or through Git Bash, the operation completes almost instantly.

I have tried, without success:

  • Uninstalling programs such as Dropbox, 7-Zip and TortoiseGit
  • Disabling anti-virus programs (Windows Firewall / MBAM)
  • Disabling / clearing recent file history
  • Disabling all non-essential services
  • Disabling thumbnails
  • Resetting Windows

What else can I try to diagnose or fix this problem?

EDIT

Process Monitor looks promising, but I am still finding it difficult to pinpoint the problem; when creating a directory, there are 47,896 events between the start and end of the operation!

There is no obvious long-running operation; only 42 events took longer than 0.0005 seconds and NONE took longer than 0.001 seconds.

(One outlier is SearchIndexer.exe, whose FileSystemControl event took 3.3 seconds. However this took place on a different drive and does not seem to have delayed any subsequent events. Out of an abundance of caution I ran the Search and Indexing troubleshooter, which identified and fixed a permissions problem, but the problem with Windows Explorer persists.)

Dan
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  • Don't use thumbnail preview. Disable showing files properties in the bottom bar. – eventHandler Feb 07 '21 at 10:32
  • I would initially use Process Monitor to see what's going on. – HelpingHand Feb 07 '21 at 13:45
  • @HelpingHand that says very little! – barlop Feb 08 '21 at 08:33
  • you could try different RAM.. a different hard drive. Different windows installation – barlop Feb 08 '21 at 08:34
  • @eventHandler I don't know how to disable showing file properties but disabling thumbnails did not help. – Dan Feb 08 '21 at 08:42
  • @HelpingHand Process Monitor was a fantastic suggestion, but I am finding it very difficult to pinpoint the problem; see edits. – Dan Feb 08 '21 at 08:42
  • @barlop Good point about the hard drive - I have 2 installed and the problem happens with both. I have a laptop so can't easily change the RAM. – Dan Feb 08 '21 at 08:42
  • @Dan why can't you easily change the RAM? Most laptops changing RAM and Hard drives are easy.. Only ones where it's hard is where it's so badly designed that you have to lift the keyboard to get to eg the RAM.. in which case you got a silly laptop and should have got a business class laptop. Businesses look for laptops that function reasonably well and are easy to maintain, at least re HDD and RAM – barlop Feb 08 '21 at 08:47
  • try a fresh windows installation and if you don't have another hard drive to use for the fresh windows install then try shrink the partition and install windows fresh to a new partition of one of the hard drives.. and consider that/id maybe you have a rubbish / consumer grade laptop where you cant even access the RAM. – barlop Feb 08 '21 at 08:49
  • Did the PML capture include the System process? I think it is filtered out by default. – HelpingHand Feb 08 '21 at 09:26
  • @barlop I may be mistaken. It's a gaming laptop. I'll look into changing the RAM more carefully after I've ruled out other options. I don't have any spare RAM lying around. Is it likely that faulty RAM would affect ONLY Windows Explorer? – Dan Feb 08 '21 at 15:59
  • @HelpingHand You're right that System events were being filtered out, but if I disable the default filters I still don't see anything obviously concerning. – Dan Feb 08 '21 at 16:03
  • I think you'd probably need to share some trace data. If willing I would suggest a PML trace as .PML, including all events when you re-create the issue. As a separate test, so as not to skew the data too much, I would also run from an admin cmd prompt: `wpr.exe -start GeneralProfile` Then reproduce the issue before running: `wpr.exe -stop C:\gp.etl`. I'd be happy to take a look at the etl and a PML file. They both zip well. – HelpingHand Feb 08 '21 at 16:09
  • @HelpingHand Thank you, that's very generous. I have uploaded the trace files here temporarily: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8mw8pb1leutr469/captures.zip?dl=0 – Dan Feb 08 '21 at 18:43
  • One thing, while symbols load, the "System" process seems pretty busy calling RtlScrubMemory: https://imgur.com/a/dPHe0h7 Therefore https://superuser.com/questions/635837/high-cpu-load-from-system-when-idle might be worth a look to see if that reduces some load. – HelpingHand Feb 08 '21 at 20:26
  • If under: "C:\WINDOWS\system32\Drivers\" you rename the following drivers: cewd64f.sys,cewd64r.sys and cewd64.sys and reboot, do you still see the same problem? If you rename them to .off for example so you can put then back. Beyond that I would run https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shexview.html to disable some of the non-MS shell extensions and then reboot. I would also consider removing Malware bytes and check then. Was "Disabling" it turning off the real-time scanning? The file system filter would probably still be filtering. – HelpingHand Feb 08 '21 at 20:49
  • Disabled all non-MS shell extensions and uninstalled MBAM - little to no difference. I wasn't able to rename or move those .sys files, HOWEVER reinstalling the associated software seems to have fixed the problem. It's like night and day :) – Dan Feb 09 '21 at 08:44

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