Vista - Long Delay When Displaying Icons in Start Menu Subfolders

Hello everybody,

The Start Menu is extremely long opening folders and sbfolders. The magnifying glass turns round and round. It can take over one minute; however, if closing the menu and coming back, I find the folder I tried to open already open; if I try to open one of its sufolders, the same happens again with the subfolder.

I've read the tutorial at Menu Show Delay Time, but that method doesn't solve my case.

I don't know if there is any coincidence, but when this problem appeared all programs started to stop responding from time to time, more often Firefox.

Very grateful for any help on repairing.

Sounds like some sort of timeout due to a network search or similar. In other words, Explorer feels compelled to look elsewhere - not just on your local machine - every time the start menu is being examined. That sort of symptom can be caused by shell extensions, anti-virus filters... many things.

Does the same thing happen if you log on as a different user?

Thanks for the answer.

What you say about the network possibility did come to my mind, but I discarded the idea because this is a standalone computer connected to the internet only.

I just made a reinstallation two days ago and installed MS Office and a few apps. Only put the simple free ZoneAlarm and not anti-virus yet. I have always had problems since I moved to Vista.

I logged in with a new user account and the problem didn’t show up, so it is related to the admin account I’m using. I wanted to avoid another clean installation not to lose another couple of days; installing the OS takes only about 1 ½ hour, but with apps and customizing is very, it's all very long...

It may still be a timeout caused by some component waiting for a response which will never come.

Are you saying the same problem came back even after a full reinstall?

I really doubt it's Vista that's broken because the vast majority of people running Vista don't have this issue, otherwise they'd be climbing all over your post. The obvious conclusion is that there's something "special" about your environment.

At least you now know it's profile-specific. Does the same thing happen under the affected admin account if you boot to safe mode?

It seems, but how to find out where, and how to repair?

Yes, a full reinstall, but without reformatting. This problem just appeared before that, and came back now.

The same thing happens on normal or safe mode for either profile.

Every time I go to the start menu I have to click and wait for a long time or click again to close it and come back. I do not have enough knowledge to find out what it is and repair it.

The information in your posts is inconsistent:

1 - "I logged in with a new user account and the problem didn’t show up, so it is related to the admin account I’m using."

2 - "The same thing happens on normal or safe mode for either profile."

A "profile" in this context is analogous to a user account, just in case we have a terminology misunderstanding. Either the problem is limited to one account, or it's not. If it IS account-specific, you could consider simply creating another account. Even if you have to reinstall a bit of software and redo some settings, it might be faster than getting to the bottom of the issue or reinstalling from scratch.

You shouldn't be using an administrator account for daily activities anyway. It's considered bad form from a security point of view. Instead, log on as a normal (non-admin) user to do your work, and only elevate to admin when you've got specific machine configuration tasks to accomplish.

I’m sorry, I think I didn’t explain clearly enough.

“2 –“ The same thing happens whether on normal or safe mode. That is, problem remains with the admin account I use on both modes; the problem doesn’t show up on the new account/profile on any mode.

I always use an admin account with Vista because I do not want to be all the time interrupted by for me undesirable security questions. I do not need any security of the type provided by another user account because my computer is a standalone and no one else has ever access to it.

Thanks to your suggestions, I understood the start menu problem lies on the admin account, so I believe, but I do want to use this account. So now, I only ask what I can do something to put it right. I think I can’t delete the Administrator account and create a new one because if I do it this way the new one probably will be like any other administrators group account, keeping asking for permissions.

Sorry for disturbing, I’ve been using Windows since Windows 3 and never had problems that I couldn’t solve myself, but I’m really fed up with Vista, not stopping having problems one right after the other.

You're not "disturbing" at all. It's a help forum. I just needed to clarify the seemingly contradictory statements

To be frank, if this is not some trivial UI issue like that "menu show delay time" thing you already checked out, it could be a right royal pain to troubleshoot. I understand you'd like _that_ admin account back, but just ask yourself whether it's worth your time. You could always create another admin account and disable the UAC (not a good idea) or use policies to make UAC auto-allow everything done by admins (better idea, safer).

To troubleshoot, you should check out the tutorial here on how to find and disable Explorer "shell extensions". I'd also suggest uninstalling "inspection" utilities one-by-one in the hope that one of them is responsible. Anti-virus, anti-malware, 3rd-party firewalls... you know it doesn't happen in safe mode, so obviously the cause is a component which loads only in normal mode. MSCONFIG (built-in) and AutoRuns (sysinternals.com) can help you selectively knock out normal-mode additions until you find the one responsible.

The deterministic way to troubleshoot is to use tools like Process Explorer and Process Monitor (also from sysinternals.com), or even a debugger (if you've done that type of analysis before), to check what the relevant Explorer.exe threads are doing during the delay. They're presumably waiting for some synchronisation object or an event to fire.

Thank you for your kind answer.

Yes, it is something trivial, yet continually bothering. I have looked in group policy editor, but didn’t find what to change. Troubleshooting will take a long time to get the same results.

As I said, I think the easiest way would be to delete the present Administrator account and create a new one, but before doing that I tried creating an account within the administrators group and it doesn’t work because I get always the permission question notice. I don’t know how to avoid this, but as this seems to be the easiest and quickest way, and you say it can be done, please tell me how, and we put an end on this problem for good.

I think the question about normal and safe mode is not clear yet. In short, the problem is on the admin account only, either in normal mode or in safe mode; full stop.

You may find that this is what you're looking for:

Run GPEDIT.MSC,
> Computer Configuration
> > Windows Settings
> > > Security Settings
> > > > Local Policies
> > > > > Security Options

Then have a look at all the listed policies whose names begin with "User Account Control" (UAC). The one that's particularly interesting in this scenario is "Behavior of the elevation prompt for administrators in Admin Approval Mode". By default, it's set to "prompt for consent" which means you get asked to approve something even though you don't have to type the credentials in.

If you change that to "elevate without prompting", all admin accounts will be able to elevate without prompts. In other words, you just won't see the prompts again.

That's far better than disabling UAC altogether (which is a bad idea for many other reasons) because it's still safer. For example, IE can still run in "protected mode", which it can't do with UAC off.