IE9 and FF9 both very slow to load browser windows

I have a PC with windows 7 64bit installed and a pair of SSDs striped as the primary drive. Windows threw a wobbly the other day and said it couldn't load and it appeared to be linked to the RAID array somehow. It started working but ever since some programmes have had issues. The majority have been fixed with a reinstall of the software with error.

I still have one really annoying issue. Both IE9 and FireFox9 take an age to start. IE Loads up a browser but is unresponsive for a good 30 secs and Firefox doesn't even display a browser window for nearly a minute. Once a browser is open I can open a second window instantaneously. However, close all browser windows and it takes an age to re-open.

I have uninstalled Firefox, Norton Security, Java, Flash etc... and reinstalled them all but to no avail. I have also run a clean reboot disabling all non MS Services and startup applications. I have also run ccleaner and wiped everythings history, cache etc...

Any suggestions greatly appreciated

Andrew

Hi Andrew, Welcome to Seven Forums.

IE on my pc's is slightly faster in opening than FF (default) on which I use very little addons.

There was never much in it on my PC previously. They were both pretty much instant.

This is a Quad core Athlon with 8gb RAM and a pair of SSDs in a Stripped Array - there must be a software issue if it takes between 30 seconds and a minute to load a browser. All other applications load up as expected. Its just the browsers. So I suspect its something common to both hence trying AV, Java etc....

Andrew

Your specification is much higher than my lappy. I use Firefox 9 (with about 13 add-ons) and it loads instantly fast. There might be spyware or adware causing the slow start-up of IE 9 and Firefox (maybe).

I suspected some sort of malware may have been to blame and I have run a full scan with Norton Internet Security. Found a few tracking cookies but nothing else. Can anyone recommend a more through tool than NIS? I assumed this would be pretty good and nothing else required?

I suspect your problem is damaged files on your raid SSD drives & not malware.
You could try repairing your system files by booting with your Windows Install disk.
Maybe removing IE9 from Control Panel> Programs> Programs & Features> Installed Updates & reverting back to IE8 then reinstalling IE9 using Windows update might fix IE.
When you uninstalled Firefox did you clean out everything relating to Firefox in C:\Users\....\AppData before you reinstalled it, if you try this remember to back up your bookmarks etc..... first.

You could also run procmon and have it logging whilst starting one of the browsers and filter on just that process (for example, iexplore.exe) and see what it's actually doing during that time.

Should have mentioned this first.
Select properties of your raid drive in Windows explorer then the tools tab & check your drive for errors , ...... not sure how well it works for raid drives though.