Icons in menus and folders load/display slowly

I'm running a reasonably potent system with Win7 x64, and it seems kind of sluggish at loading & handling icons. For example, after a fresh reboot, if I open the Start menu (or whatever it's called in 7) and click on All Programs, I can hear the hard drive being accessed and the icons sort of fill in down the list of programs. Same thing when I navigate folders, often I can see the icons sequentially being loaded as the page is displayed. I don't remember this much delay in icons being loaded and drawn as I navigated XP.

It seems to me that with 4 gigs of ram, that ought to be more than enough for most icons (at least the common ones that are part of Win7) should be loaded into RAM at bootup, so that all icons would be displayed instantly when you open a page or folder. It really looks kind of primitive to see the icons populate.

I've already tried increasing the Icon Cache Size/Max Cached icons via the registry, but I can't really tell a difference.

Does anyone else see this pokey icon drawing behavior in Win7 or am I crazy?

What all do you have loading at startup?
Check msconfig and see what's going on under startup. IMO

Probably not related but with Microsoft Security Essentials installed, this is one of the symptoms for me.

I have this slow icon loading and do believe it is related to MSE.

Nosmo said:

I have this slow icon loading and do believe it is related to MSE.

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We're not the only ones. Wilders has quite a few members who have reported the same

Here is all I have at startup


and have had NO problems with MSE

Thanks for the replies. I have very few startup apps or third party processes: AVG Free antivirus v9, the dumb Adobe speedlauncher that you can't easily get rid of, and the Java updater process that won't turn off. Everything else is just standard Windows processes. Also, I'm not using MSE. Maybe I should try temporarily disabling AVG and see if this changes.

On my other, substantially older PC running XP, there is no detectible delay in loading or displaying icons in menus and such.

Maybe I'll make a short video of this using FRAPS or some other utility. It's not a huge problem, but it's something that seems klunky for a modern OS.

Does it persist for the whole time the PC is up, or does it go away after some time and things are snappy?

cluberti said:

Does it persist for the whole time the PC is up, or does it go away after some time and things are snappy?

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It only happens the first time the folder or menu item is accessed. After that, the icon data seems to be in memory and it displays immediately (until the next reboot).

Below is a link to video of what I'm talking about: at 0:07, when I click on the Accessories folder in the start menu, you can see the icons being loaded and drawn in from top to bottom. It only takes a half second, but it's still a visual annoyance. Most people probably wouldn't care. IMHO those icons (which are default Windows system icons) should be preloaded into memory at boot, but it seems they are loaded from the hard drive on an "on demand" basis.

YouTube - Windows 7 - Icons in menus sluggish to load/display

I wonder if you simply have icon cache problems - have you tweaked the install at all? I know there are tools out there to rebuild the icon cache, and reg keys to increase it's size, but if it happens on every reboot that would seem to indicate perhaps icon cache problems?

cluberti said:

I wonder if you simply have icon cache problems - have you tweaked the install at all? I know there are tools out there to rebuild the icon cache, and reg keys to increase it's size, but if it happens on every reboot that would seem to indicate perhaps icon cache problems?

Click to expand...

Could be... I'm not sure what you mean by "tweak" the install, this is a prebuilt system that had an OEM version of Win7 already loaded out-of-the-box. I have tried to increase the icon cache size, but I have not tried to delete/rebuild the icon cache database file. Which might be worth a shot.

Same problem but no MSE loaded

I am having this same problem on a completely fresh install of Windows 7 Ult x64. I have been running Win7 on this machine since the beta just before the RC and have used every version up until current. This has never happened even after I have loaded eleventy billion apps.

I have Win installed on my Vertex SSD with apps separated to my WD storage drive. I haven't even gotten far enough to install anything other than the same drivers I used before my reinstall. I just can't think of what could be causing it. Everything seems responsive except for menus. I get a white page icon for about 2 seconds before the regular on loads, and they only load when I look at them. Meaning if I pull the menu up it takes a few secs to draw the icons/folders, then if I go back later to look in a folder I get same delay inside each folder. I really don't want to reinstall everything again and just hope it fixes it...

It might be useful to run process monitor whilst reproducing the thumbnail delay to see if there's any hdd file or registry access that is causing the delay.

I have the same darn problem, is the only thing i really hate from Windows 7 and the problem was long time before i installed MSE so could not be the problem. Every time i reboot or do a could boot and go to Start--> All Programs the icons have to reload again. I have tried the cache rebuild, but nothing helps. Is there any word from Microsoft on this matter?