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My computer's boot time is way longer than I want it to be, so I ran some checks to see what slows down the booting process. I found out that explorer.exe takes over 30 seconds of cpu time on boot. Is there a way I can make explorer boot faster?

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Your problem is almost certainly not Explorer itself, rather it's a 3rd party program or shell extension that taking all that time.

The first port of call is using Autoruns from Sysinternals to both check what's running when your system starts up and disable things that you don't need.

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I already had that installed, and I also have disabled most of the explorer plugins. I now have left the following extensions: Stardock Fences, Dropbox, Comodo Firewall, Avira, PowerISO, TerraCopy, Winrar and TortoiseSVN. Do you know if any of these extensions is known to give any problems? – Tiddo Nov 30 '11 at 16:18
Those are all popular enough programs that if one of them were buggy and causing problems, lots of people should know about it. That said, my gut says to look first at Dropbox, Comodo Firewall, and Avira. One of them might be doing some kind of network activity that's stalling Explorer, but you might have to diagnose with Process Monitor. You may get lucky with TCPView or Process Explorer though. – afrazier Nov 30 '11 at 16:26
Ok, I will have a look at those. Avira itself is also taking more than 30s to launch on startup, so it won't suprise me if that's the problem. By the way: I found these startup times I mentioned here using Process Monitor. However, I don't know how to see what causes explorer to take so long to start. Can you give me any help with that? – Tiddo Nov 30 '11 at 19:14
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