Delay in explorer.exe startup

[Plxply]

Hello,

I've started to experience a strange problem where my laptop seems to be completely idle before starting explorer.exe (So I have a blue desktop with only the mouse pointer) this is after login as I have it set to automatically login. I have tried various things, I have looked through Autoruns and there is nothing which I can find which would be delaying startup, I have tried removing almost everything non-essential from startup however the problem does not fix. I have also tried doing a boot trace with Process Monitor to see if any process is timing out, however nothing stands out to me as delaying explorer.exe from starting.

Is there any further diagnostic I can do, or any idea on what can be causing the slow down?

 

[Mike Connor]

Have you added any information headers ( AKA "Sort Headers")? Especially "Size" information. Special Icons etc? All these things can delay Explorer startup.

Regards....Mike Connor

 

[Plxply]

I appear to have overlooked the simple and have just attempted to boot into Safe mode. It seems that the problem does not persist and therefore I assume it's something I've done in regards to installing applications. My main question is, what is most likely to delay explorer.exe in starting or cause it to take a long time to appear? I will rerun a boot trace with process monitor again to see if I can find anything and possibly post the results (of course with appropriate filters as I know the files come out at 1GB).

 

[Mike Connor]

Various add-ons can delay Explorer start-up considerably. Does this only occur when you start Explorer after a boot, or every time you start Explorer?

Regards....Mike Connor

 

[Plxply]

Killing explorer.exe through the task manager and also relaunching it is extremely fast, so I assume it is something that is loading before explorer which is the problem? Typically either it would be stuck on the "Loading" screen for a long time or hold at the blue background with the pointer which I assume is before explorer.exe has started. I'm also looking through the boot log now.

 

[Plxply]

I've noticed something very strange throughout process monitor, for some reason explorer.exe keeps accessing, reading and writing to:

C:\Users\(Username)\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Burn

With one of these event taking 24 seconds, is this normal for Windows or is it possibly indicating an issue?

 

[Mike Connor]

No, it is not normal. There is no reason for Explorer to access "Burn" unless you are actually trying to burn a disc.

First. I would run CCleaner;

CCleaner - Optimization and Cleaning - Free Download

then mrublaster;

MRU-Blaster™

then run a disc cleanup.

If this does not solve the problem, then also run a scan with Malwarebytes to see if some malware is affecting your system.

Regards....Mike Connor

 

[whs]

If you run Soluto ( Soluto ), it will show you all processes running at startup and it provides the tools to manage them (kill, delay, etc.)

 

[Plxply]

First. I would run CCleaner;
then mrublaster;
then run a disc cleanup.

If this does not solve the problem, then also run a scan with Malwarebytes to see if some malware is affecting your system.

Done, done and done. I even booted up a live CD of Ubuntu in the event I managed to attract a rootkit, although the avast scan came up completely clean.

The main problem is normally applications are started after the execution of explorer.exe so therefore this I assume is most likely something beforehand going wrong. Although I shall run Soluto to see if anything can be found.

If anyone else has any more ideas or thinks they can find it in the process monitor log please tell me, I've been trying to fix this for the last week.

EDIT: Here's the Soluto result, I don't think Dropbox is the problem but I will try and see what happens if I remove it. The main issue is that "System" is taking 50 seconds, which is how long it took before to get to the desktop.

EDIT 2: Well I uninstalled Dropbox and I don't know how to explain it but somehow my boot time got significantly longer:

 

[Mike Connor]

A couple of points. It shouldn't make any difference to the length of the Explorer file manager startup time what other applications you start. The only things that can normally affect this are modifications to the Explorer file manager itself. Some programs, especially many shell extensions, use "hooks" and similar techniques to add functionality to the Explorer file manager, ( Windows Explorer is not just the file manager, Explorer is the default Windows shell). The more information you want to display, and the larger the directory you want to open, the longer explorer takes to do it.

However, if you suspect some other program is affecting file manager startup time, ( although this is very unlikely), then you can use CCleaner "tools" to disable startup entries, and see if that solves the problems;



If you get some "odd" problems with Explorer or other programs, then it is often a good idea to delete old prefetch data. You can also do this with CCleaner;



Some other Explorer problems can also be solved by using CCleaner to delete various caches etc.

I have not seen a problem with "Burn" in this regard, but it seems likely that Explorer is trying to do something which it would not normally do as a default action when starting.

This can only be due to either old data which has not been cleaned from a cache, or some external program which has changed Explorer's default behaviour.

Also, it is often necessary to restart Explorer. There are various ways of doing this, the simplest way on a standard Windows 7 installation is;

Press <CTRL> + <SHIFT>, now right-click on an empty area in the Start menu. You’ll see a menu with two options, Exit Explorer and Properties.

Select the Exit Explorer command. Start menu, Taskbar and Desktop will the closed and the other applications will continue to run in the background.


To manually start a new Explorer.exe, press CTRL+ALT+DELETE to launch Task Manager.


Go to File > New Task(Run) type explorer.exe in the new task box to restart the explorer.


This can also be done with a simple batch file;

[INDENT]taskkill /f /im explorer.exe
 explorer.exe
 [/INDENT]

Copy the code to a text file, name the file RestartExplorer or similar, and save it as a .bat file. Clicking on this will now stop Explorer and restart it.


If you clear the "Tray Notifications Cache" using CCleaner, ( which resets the cache and solves quite a few problems), then you also need to stop and then restart Explorer before continuing. as otherwise the cache is NOT cleared. Restarting the machine itself is no use in this case. For changes to take effect you MUST stop and then restart Explorer.

It is also a good idea to check that everything is as desired by shutting the machine down and re-booting

Regards....Mike Connor

 

[whs]

In Soluto, you can delay start any process. You should try to do that with some of the system processes of which you know that they are not immediately needed. And if it does not work, you can always change it back. Will take some experimenting.

 

[ZaLiTH]

Just a random thought, but what about a registry clean and defrag? I'm pretty sure you'll be able to do those functions through the trial of TuneUp Utilities... I've been running TuneUp Utilities for ages on my PC, never had any problems with it (unlike some other registry cleaners I've tried).

Other than that, I'd suggest you look through the start-up entries on your computer with SysInternals' Autoruns, that will show all start-up entries from all locations.

I know it seems almost too simple, but often long start-up times are caused by an autorun entry trying to launch an application that no longer exists. God knows I've had that problem all too many times (I install and uninstall a lot of little utilities just to test)...

 

[Plxply]

After an hour of Autoruns Wack-a-mole, I thought I nailed the perpetrator to Java, so I obviously uninstalled it to see if this resolved the problem. However when I restarted after removing Java the problem persisted! I removed everything from Autoruns, slowly adding each back, it was working fine up until to point I re-added Java at which point I noticed a significant slowdown, so of course I unticked it. But the problem is still lasting even after an uninstall! I don't understand how enabling Java then uninstalling it later can cause a problem. I've actually figured out through stop-watch that the problem actually prolongs the display of the "Starting Windows" splash and also the display of the loading and desktop, adding a whole minute to boot.

I'm rather at the end of my tether at the moment and I would just reinstall Windows how much this is annoying me, but I would appreciate any further suggestions.

 

[whs]

Why don't you just set Java to delayed start.

 

[Plxply]

The problem is I don't think it's Java, I've totally uninstalled it and the problem is still persisting. It is no longer showing in Autoruns either, but it seems as soon as I enabled it, but the long boot stayed so I assume it was a coincidence?

 

[whs]

Did you run Soluto to find the culprit?

 

[breakfast]

I just started to look this up because Im having the exact same issue on my laptop...ive had it for a while and now Im fed up.

whenever i have this issue I get a pop up on the bottom saying explorer is waiting to burn something.... once things move forward (after a couple mins of explorer not loading) it will load and then the java update box pops up.

I havent delved to far into this , but I have no idea why its trying to burn something.


Seems the burn and possibly java are the culprits. Just wanted to chime in and let the OP know hes not alone with this issue.

Hopefully we can figure this out.

edit: I checked my burner(by double clicking on the drive in my computer) and and it had a big iso waiting to be burned for some reason. I just deleted it. So Ill see if this helps with the issue. No idea why it was there in the first place.

 

[cauda]

infection! its probably on whitelist. i turned every rock and it was rundll32.exe , which i never saw running before. deleted both and in system and in wow64, and anything that mentioned it remotely in search, and voila. it may be some other "essential". they hide it in files on whitelists which are never or rarely checked... nor malwarebytes nor spybot found it. no more delay YAY, it was driving me crazy...
before it use apps mentioned above just to make sure + you need unlocker to delete everything + terminate every process possible(not services,nor svchosts)