Windows 7: USB Hard Drive Slows Computer to a Crawl

I have several external USB hard drives (2 TB each) that I use to back up files - they all worked wonderfully on my five year old Win XP machine.

I just got a brand new Win 7 machine and whenever I plug any of the drives into any of the USB ports, the system slows to an unusable crawl. It takes minutes to navigate screens. Also, the hard drive activity is maxed out. However, using task manager there are no processes sucking either cpu or ram.

Any ideas?

My guess is your antivirus is trying to scan the new disk everytime you attach it.
...at least that's my first guess.
The next one involves power option settings pertaining to usb devices.

Quick update - everything works fine in Safe Mode. While in there I altered the setting for "best performance" under the policies tab, which I was told by the mostly useless Dell tech may help. It did not.

Let me list exactly what I do and what happens, as that may offer some insight:

- Fresh boot computer - everything loads fast and normal.
- Plug in external hard drive
- Windows immediately slows to a crawl and the boot disk activity goes to 100%
- I unplug external hard drive but windows continues to crawl
- I am eventually able to click "restart" but another few minutes pass
- I get the "force restart" screen saying that windows is waiting for the following programs to end, or I can click the button to force them to quit... HOWEVER, there are no programs listed there.
- I let it go and eventually it restarts, nice and quick once more.

AARGH!

Clearly, something that isn't loading with Safe Mode is causing this.

Which actually adds validity to my thought, we can pretty much be certain at this point some software package you are running is interfering with data transfer.
I still putt the av at the top of that list even after hearing this.

I am only running MSE - should I uninstall it or will turning off real-time protection be just as effective?

Snoozing real time should be enough to see if it's the problem
if it isn't we're probably going to have to have a look at your startup apps, to see what could be doing it.

Disabled the AV had no effect.

Any reports you want me to run to see what could be causing the conflict?

Thanks!

well it's possible whatever is doing it is flooding the logs too, you could try following the steps here to give a copy of the app and system logs.
http://www.sevenforums.com/crashes-d...tructions.html

Back to work today... here's what I did.

Fresh boot - connected hard drive - the usual occured - I rebooted computer so I could run the programs.

I attached a zip file of the results...

Thanks again for helping me! This is very frustrating.

Do you have the latest chipset drivers loaded for your system?