Summary: Windows Explorer can often take an unexpectedly long time to display its initial screen. There are several common causes of Windows Explorer's delay.
Why is there such a long delay before Drives & Files appear when double clicking on "My Computer" in Windows XP?
It started after I had to do a deep cleaning of my PC in terms of spyware and used several registry cleaners. Everything seems to run fine and smooth now, but I still have this problem.
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This is another of those situations that can actually be caused by many, many different things.
Fortunately, there are a couple of really common causes, so I'll look at those and we can see whether they help you at all.
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When you double click on My Computer it launches Windows Explorer which then goes off and constructs a summary of all the mass storage devices on your system, as well as a few other special categories of devices. ("Mass storage" devices, by the way, are disk drives and things that look like disk drives.)
Here's a look at mine:
As part of pulling together that summary, Windows Explorer actually goes out and queries each device listed for information. For example, in order to determine that my "C:" drive has 23.2 GB of space left, Windows Explorer actually checks a few things on the disk. Makes sense, right?
Similarly, in order to determine that drive "F:" is a "Removable Disk" (it's a USB thumbdrive) and that it's labeled "SPINRITE V6" (I have a copy of the excellent hard disk management tool SpinRite on it), it had to open and actually read the drive.
The most common cause of a delay in opening Windows Explorer is that one or more of the drives listed have become inaccessible.
For example, I have a persistent network connection on drive "N:" to a machine at my wife's business, but as shown in the image above, it's currently disconnected. Windows Explorer's attempts to get information about that drive will fail. That may add time - the failure may be in the form of a timeout. Windows Explorer will ask for the information and will wait for some amount of time for it to come back. When it doesn't, it labels the drive as "Disconnected" and moves on.
The timeout is typically noticeable, and if you have more than one network drive in this situation, it can be very noticeable.
The second most common reason for a delay is something called "spin up" time.
You can't tell from the display here, but my drive "E:" is an external Maxtor USB/Firewire hard disk that I use for backing up. Many disks, particularly external ones like this, will turn off their hard disks after some period of not being used to save power. The circuitry remains active, but the hard disk stops spinning. The next time that the drive is accessed for any reason, that hard disk must be turned on and must start spinning again. There's often a noticeable delay until the hard disk reaches its operating speed.
And yes, Windows Explorer's display can be affected by this delay.
The bottom line is that Windows Explorer is at the mercy of the devices it's listing. If any of those devices experience a delay in returning the information that Windows Explorer is asking for, you'll notice. Disconnecting network drives and perhaps unplugging other devices could at least give you a clue as to which device is contributing to the delay.
Related:
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Ask Leo! - Why does my network connection drop every so often?
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Ask Leo! - Why did my home network stop working?
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Ask Leo! - Why does my network not work after resuming from standby?
Article C2854 - November 26, 2006
FYI, I had to stop all the HP services installed with my c7250 printer. Works fine now. Note, I probably didn't have to stop them all as only one was probably causing the issue, but I didn't have the patience to experiment and find out.
Posted by: Tom at June 8, 2008 10:11 PMI had the same problem and disabling WIA did not help. Some poking around revealed the real reason. I had a folder on my desktop with a really deep hierarchy and a LOT of files (200-300). Moving that folder to a different destination fixed it. Anything destination other than the desktop should work. In my case, I moved it to c:\temp. Hope that helps someone.
Posted by: dunkin at June 18, 2008 10:24 AMI found that Windows Explorer was taking 20 seconds or so to open up properly. I found that the problem seemed to be related to the number of drives you had and by going to Tools/Folder Options/Offline files and unchecking the 'Enable Offline files' checkbox solved the problem.
Posted by: Steve Gardner at August 10, 2008 3:19 PMI recently experienced significant delays in opening folder contents with W Explorer (WXP Pro, duo core).
It turns out that an upgrade to Spybot 1.6 caused this. I uninstalled Spybot 1.6 and problem solved. I'll try installing 1.6 again to see if the issue re-occurs, or else drop back to an older version of Spybot.
Paul
Posted by: Paul at August 11, 2008 12:21 PMFollowing is a Copy/Paste of an article that solved this problem on my PC:
NOTE: ALWAYS set a new System Restore point before running Regedit!
Blank Device Danager and very SLOW windows Explorer Start-up
Posted by: Bob Petrie at August 15, 2008 5:30 PMGo to Start/Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Services. Scroll down to Plug and Play Service and stop and restart it. Reboot. Once done the Device Manager will populate again.
NOT ALWAYS!!
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Start, Run, Regedit (Enter):
Check the Permissions of HKey_Local_Machine\System\CurrentControlSet\Enum
Should have two users:
Everyone = Read permission
System = Full
Navigate to the key using Regedit, Right Click the Enum key and then click Permissions.
(The last one fixed my problems)
Same issue here and it was fixed by removing spybot's latest version. Weird. THANKS TO PAUL who posted this fix here.
Posted by: braider at September 5, 2008 12:25 PMI found that the biggest delay on my system was from a windows "feature" I never use - "My Network Places." After using my work computer for a year or so, opening windows explorer was taking close to a minute. I tried getting rid of all mapped drives, etc, without any significant decrease, however, after I deleted the shortcuts (69, if I recall correctly) that windows had put in "My Network Places" by default, windows explorer now opens instantly. I'll be deleting these on a regular basis now.
Posted by: User at December 7, 2008 7:39 PMAnd to add to the "My Network Places" debacle... Windows automatically searches and adds stuff to this list...
You can safely delete any of the icons that represent shortcuts to network shares in "My Network Places", and you can also disable the automatic search for network shares, using the following steps:
1. Open any system folder (My Computer, My Network Places, or Windows Explorer) and choose Tools, Folder Options, to open the Folder Options dialog.
2. Click the View tab.
3. In the Advanced Settings list, click the check box next to Automatically Search for Network Folders and Printers check box to clear the check mark.
4. Click OK.
That takes care of the "automatic" ones... to stop it from adding shortcuts for drives you browse to:
Posted by: user at December 8, 2008 12:52 PMhttp://support.microsoft.com/kb/242578
I had this same problem on one of my production Windows 2003 servers and resolved it by removing a CD that was left in the CD-ROM drive. The disk was in there so long that it became covered with dust and was unreadable.
Posted by: Slugger at April 2, 2009 12:48 PMLeo,
Thanks a MILLION for your article; it saved me a MAJOR pain!
"The most common cause of a delay in opening Windows Explorer is that one or more of the drives listed have become inaccessible."
I followed you advice and was able to identify a network drive which was "dead", upon removing it from the mapped drives: ¡VOILA!
Posted by: PatrickPK at June 4, 2009 6:36 AM