Windows 7: Start Menu Icons slow to populate, help :(

I recently noticed that my desktop icons (8) and tray buttons (7) were re-populating a lot and werent that nippy either... so I tried the MaxCachedIcons hack AND then changed it to Max Cached Icons as I read the first one doesnt work... anyway nothing happened and I noticed that my Start Menu Icons are slow to populate (about 4 per second) and the ADMIN TOOLS link i have on populates now at 1 per second???

ive since deleted the Max Cached Icons from registry and im left with this problem..



its REALLY annoying cos it shouldnt be doing this and ive only recently re-installed Windows 7 32-Bit (from 64-Bit) to see if it fixed another problem I had with high DPC/ISR usage when copying or downloading files... which didnt work... ive been told its a Windows 7 bug but dunno about that... anway thats another problem for another time, right now i want this cache problem fixed....

can anyone help me please?

thanks

Increase the size of your icon cache.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer
Create/change DWORD -- MaxCachedIcons and set its value to 1024 or 2048.

hi, thanks for your reply

As you can see from my original post this is what i already tried which seemed to either not work or make it worse... I read on other forums that the above hack does not work for Windows 7 and you have to add spaces between words and create a new STRING Value instead... so I tried that too and that didnt work??? ive since removed it and now have seriously slow icon cache BUT its seems to be ONLY on the START MENU and TASKBAR...??? everywhere else is OK like control panel etc...

also, when u set that is it DECIMAL or HEXIDECIMAL.....

found culprit -PANDA CLOUD ANTIVIRUS - it slugging up the PC... soon as I removed it everything was fine... there was also long pauses when run installers

Same here, found out the problem was Avast. Funny thing though, it was working ok and then just started slowing down the pc for no reason. I have not changed its settings. Probably got worse with the recent automatic update of Avast, who knows...

Disabled it and now the problem is solved

yes same thing here even when I disable Avast and have it not running at startup it still does it... but if I un install it what will we have as an Anti Virus... looking at raymond's cc blog Avast seemed the lightest and fastest... is there no decent lite anti virus out there!?

Yes there is: http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials

yes but according to thorough benchmarks by raymond at raymond.cc

MSE is slower than avast hence why i chose avast.

did switching to MSE help you at all?

Icons in menus and folders load/display slowly

Like I said, my problem was Avast. I disabled it (uninstalled it) and my system is now running ok. I am running MSE now, instead of Avast.