I click the yellow icon of File Explorer in Windows 11:
opening takes about 12 seconds.
How can I solve?

On Sat, 19 Aug 2023 09:57:26 +0200, SBIANCO
<sbianco.sbianco@gmail.com> wrote:

>I click the yellow icon of File Explorer in Windows 11:
>opening takes about 12 seconds.
>How can I solve?

I don't know why it's happening (it opens instantly here), but one
thing you might consider is just leaving it open.

I use Directory Opus rather than File Explorer, but I leave it open
all the time.

On 8/19/2023 3:57 AM, SBIANCO wrote:
> I click the yellow icon of File Explorer in Windows 11:
> opening takes about 12 seconds.
> How can I solve?

It's already running. This is from Task Manager.

explorer 8708 Running paul sid=1 mem=68meg

The reference to a yellow icon, means you are launching a
explorer.exe window, from the Taskbar.

If I run ProcMon64, the trace shows explorer.exe is always
busy, and accesses a *lot* of registry entries.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procmon # about 3.3MB download, pretty small

When I look in the trace, clicking the yellow icon, causes a reference to the file

CreateFile C:\users\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\Task Bar\File Explorer.lnk

In this case, CreateFile does not create a file, it just
opens an instance enough to stat() it, maybe check the
size in bytes.

I can see a registry reference soon after, to

*\Shell\OpenNewWindow

which you might view, as evidence that launch of a new window
for the existing explorer.exe , has started.

*******

The trace has roughly 300,000 events in it.
It's pretty well impossible to write a summary.

*******

When a computer inserts a long delay before the window opens,
then Process Monitor would record lots and lots of events,
ones which are unrelated to the "silence".

What you would look for in such a case, is you would scroll down
the trace, to where the window finally opens (way late), then scroll
back just a tiny bit, and see what events led up to the window opening.
It's possible there is some "evidence", just before the window opens,
of a thing which happened to "break the silence".

*******

Now, nobody wants to do all this rubbish, right ?

We know that a lot of Explorer.exe issues are caused by the
right-click context menu, and third party code loading to
handle the context menu.

Usually, it will be some whizzy software you added,
and it has maybe just one context menu entry, and
this causes havoc. All it takes is one bad context menu
add-on, to ruin the user experience.

How do you figure out which one is doing that ?

I don't know really. I don't know if I scrolled through
the 300,000 events, I would see that or not.

But looking at your right-click Context menu, is about
all I can recommend at this point.

It's either that, or run a ProcMon trace, and have a look
just before the (delayed) window opens. The events in ProcMon are
timestamped.

While Explorer could be accessing your hard drive, and
you could have a "bad spot" at the root of C: and that
caused the long delay, this is a highly unlikely scenario.

Check your hard drive with Data Lifeguard (Western Digital)
or Seatools (Seagate), and they have a SMART short test
you can try. Otherwise, if you're experienced with
SMART tables, you'd look for an excess of reallocated sectors
in the raw data entry for that.

For example, a disk that is treading on thin ice here, lists
"400" for raw data (realloc), and when I watch the Task Manager
performance graph, there are a lot of "5000 millisecond" delays,
indicating it is having trouble reading the disk drive. It took
me *hours* trying to do Windows Update on that pig -- I found that
by leaning my hand on the drive and damping it a bit, that
Windows Update was able to make forward progress. This
was a purposeful experiment, as I've been doing tests
on that drive for years, to see when it will croak, and
how it behaves just before croaking. There is nothing of
value on the drive, and the tests continue (infrequently).

The symptoms on that drive are subtle enough, they would
not serve as a warning that something bad is happening.
People would simply assume that Windows Update sucks :-)
Which is the wrong conclusion, as there could be data loss,
real soon. This is why various actual tests are required,
to detect a HDD going out on you.

Paul

Il 19/08/2023 09:57, SBIANCO ha scritto:

> How can I solve?

I cancelled old links in my FILE EXPLORER:
solved problem.

Il 19/08/2023 15:48, Ken Blake ha scritto:

> I use Directory Opus rather than File Explorer, but I leave it open
> all the time.

Is DIRECTORY OPUS dramatically better than FILE EXPLORER?

On Sun, 20 Aug 2023 12:01:55 +0200, SBIANCO
<sbianco.sbianco@gmail.com> wrote:

>Il 19/08/2023 15:48, Ken Blake ha scritto:
>
>> I use Directory Opus rather than File Explorer, but I leave it open
>> all the time.
>
>Is DIRECTORY OPUS dramatically better than FILE EXPLORER?

In my view, yes. But I can't predict how you would feel about it. All
I can do is suggest that you try it and decide for yourself how you
feel about it,

Il 20/08/2023 15:46, Ken Blake ha scritto:

> In my view, yes.

Thank You very much.

On 8/20/2023 6:01 AM, SBIANCO wrote:
> Il 19/08/2023 09:57, SBIANCO ha scritto:
>
>> How can I solve?
>
> I cancelled old links in my FILE EXPLORER:
> solved problem.

Good catch!

It's been so long since we had one of those, I completely forget.

*******

This is how a genius debugs one of those kinds of cases. Mark Russinovich. The Sysinternals guy.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-blog-archive/the-case-of-the-veeerrry-slow-logons/ba-p/724275

I'm pretty sure a light-bulb came on, before he took all those screen-shots :-)

Paul