Windows 7: IE very slow to load pages or respond to clicks

In Windows 7 (of course), my problem is that IE is very slow to load web pages and also slow to respond to clicks such as menu clicks. It became virtually unusable last evening, taking 30 minutes or more to load a single page, and then an equally long time to respond to every click.

Here is what I've tried.

First, I wondered if there was a virus, so I booted from the Kaspersky Rescue Disk and ran a scan of the boot sectors. No malware found. I started a scan of the whole C drive. Five hours later it was still going, and apparently it was spending most of its time in a folder called Content.IE5. It was up to 1.8 million files and still only 28% done.

This gave me the idea that the problem with IE was too many temporary files, so I stopped the Kaspersky scan and booted into windows again.

I checked the free capacity of the C: drive. It's a 500 GB drive and only 100 GB were in use.

I went into the control panel for the internet options and deleted all the cookies and history and cached pages and such.



IE was still unusuably slow.

Then, at the start prompt, I typed "shell:cache" and it showed me the Temporary Internet Files folder. I could see Content.IE. I entered it and noticed four folders named with random strings of letters and numbers. I deleted them.

IE was still unusuably slow.

I created a new user with administrator privileges and went into that. I ran IE5 and it was still unusably slow.

Any ideas?

You might want to take a look at all your add ons/accelerators (tools/manage add ons), and try disabling them all. Then enable them one by one until the problem returns. That will tell you which one is the problem (if it is add ons)..

Unfortunately IE doesn't respond to clicks on its toolbar, so I can't get into "tools" or any other menu.

Hello ratsrcute,

You could open Internet Options through the Control Panel (icons view) instead.

You might see if completely resetting Internet Explorer may help.

Internet Explorer - Reset

Hope this helps,
Shawn

I tried the reset thing and it made no difference.

I to say in my original post that I also tried installing IE 9, which I believe is an upgrade from what was there, but I'm not sure.

I'm baffled. I wish I could uninstall and reinstall IE but I don't see it listed in "Programs and Features."

To uninstall IE you should look at Program & features => Show Installed Updates, then scroll all the updates to find IE, highlight it and you"ll see a tab showing uninstall, on toolbar.

I could be also flash Player that need to be updated if you have another browser along IE, the add-on flash player plugin might block the first Active X for IE. Set IE as default browser & Reinstall Active x for IE.

Thanks! Just regarding your last paragraph, I don't understand what you are trying to say. What are the steps?

I installed Firefox after all the trouble started, but when the trouble started there was no other browser.

How do I reinstall Active x for IE? Note that IE is basically non-functional. I can't do anything from within IE itself, only from the control panel.

Thanks,
Mike

I've got this weird prob as yours on Vista x32 with IE9...I had to uninstall IE9 to roll back to IE8. There was no other browser too.

I discovered Active X for IE was corrupted and therefore couldn't load properly IE and was blocking mouse clicking on tabs.

First you could uninstall Flash player from Program & Features, Uninstall/Reinstall IE and set it as your default browser and reinstall Flash player. If you still want to use IE.

You might also check the version of Microsoft Sliverlight, if v4 or v5. The latest should be fine.

To install flash Player for IE, go HERE

PS:
I'm currently with IE10 release Preview on Windows 7 x64, IE9 was fine also, got no other browser with 7.

But the Vista x32 stayed with IE8 because i think IE9 is just too powerful for it now with all the improvements made. IE is installed along with Google Chrome on Vista.

NoN's last suggestion solved it. Reputation enhanced.

You're welcome!

Glad you solved it!

@Brink,
It tooks me quite sometimes to resolve the conflict inside the Adobe Flash Player softwares with IE. Thanks for rep aswell, hope it will serve some of us!