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?

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.

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

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.

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?

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