Windows 7: Right click & drop down menus freezing in Libraries

This started a couple of weeks ago and it's driving me nuts. If I click the folder icon on the taskbar on my desktop, The libraries window opens fine, then if I click on documents or pictures, etc, that opens fine/quickly. BUT once the folder is open, if I right click on any of the pictures to get the menu for opening/sending the pic somewhere, etc, the little blue delay circle pops up for up to a minute. If I try to cancel it, it shuts the whole library page down, if I wait for a minute or two the menu will finally pop up and allow me to make a selection. The same thing happens over on the left side if I try to click the little arrows for the drop downs under the main folder headings, it takes forever and if I try to cancel it shuts it down. Same thing happens when I try to search for documents. Any ideas?

There's something installed that integrates with Explorer (most likely for right-click context menus) that is holding things up. Can you think of any program that you've installed that performs anything like this?

One way at possibly figuring it out is using Process Explorer. Open it and then attempt to do anything that will display the symptoms. When it's hung up on it, observe which process is taking up the most CPU (if it's not already sorted by CPU or CSwitch Delta column, do so). I would assume it'd be Explorer.exe. Either way, click on the process and it'll bring up a window display current running threads. Again, discover which one is taking up the most CPU/CSwitch Delta and then double click that. Click the "Copy All" and paste here for reference. Do the same for a number of the various actions that are hanging on you, and describe what you did for each one that caused it to hang.

You can also generate minidumps or full dumps to provide for us to analyze. While it's hanging, right click the suspect process and go to Create Dump then select the dump file size you want. Full dumps are large and you'll need to zip up and upload to a 3rd-party filesharing site, but they offer excellent details on what's going on. Minidumps may also be able to assist, but it's preferred to have a number of them.

I don't know of anything I've installed lately. I did the Process Explorer and please forgive me if this is like stupid obvious, but what's using the most CPU is System Idle Process, and everything else seems to be about the same. Is that normal?

There is no spiking of any kind or sudden activity from an otherwise idle process? How about sorting by process name and then performing one of the actions that causes the hang, and when it hangs check to see if any processes suddenly shows a boost of activity (again, I figure it might be explorer.exe). Check Cswitch Delta as well as CPU. As a tip, spacebar will halt and start the refreshing, so you can freeze it when need be. Note that data from any windows not open at the time will not be preserved, so if you find a process that spikes while you've frozen everything and dbl-click it to open the Threads view, it will show all threads as inactive. You'll need to start the refreshing process again to get info on it.

No, I checked it again and there is no spike at all. Not really any change at all.

Hmm, Given that it's explorer.exe that's hanging, You may need to generate a minidump or a full dump of it anyways while it's in the middle of the hang and send it to us so we'll know what was happening at the time.

Ok, also just realized that Norton Antivirus hasn't updated since 2/23 and when you try to make it update it cancels itself. ALSO, the right click is hanging when you try to open menus on desktop items but not on web pages.

Yes, that must mean something is messing with the right context menu, probably an item inside it that was added by a program that is hanging things up. Go and grab Autoruns then when it's opened and everything is finished populating, click on the Explorer tab and it will show all the Shell Extensions. Pretty much majority - if not all - of them alter the right-click menu in some shape or fashion (such as adding items like WinRAR adding an 'Add to archive' option). You can uncheck some (don't delete!) that you find may be causing the problem. I believe it should be safe to uncheck them all and see if that stabilizes your right-click menu, then if it does slowly work by rechecking items until you find the culprit. Regarding shell extensions, I'm not sure if you require restarting the PC to save the changes or not, but I would assume you'd have too.