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Is there a way to find specifically what's causing Windows 7 explorer slowness, like right-click menu delay and even opening new explorer windows/drives/folders?

  • Slowness when opening new explorer windows
  • Slowness when right-clicking files/folders
  • A "waiting" mouse cursor pops on and off rapidly before a drive/folder's contents is displayed (I'm guessing this might indicate some kind of shell extension(s) being loaded)
  • When right-click something, sometimes the appears decently quick, but if I right-click something else soon after, I'll get a 5-10 second wait

And ideally, being able to trace slowness down to a specific program/service/extension without just randomly uninstalling context menu extensions.

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    CCleaner has a "Context Menu" tab in its Startup options now that you can use to look at, enable, or disable context menu items.
    – LawrenceC
    Mar 3, 2014 at 18:49

2 Answers 2

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I believe that not there is an application that diagnoses what you want, what you can do is disable each menu item to find out what is causing the slowness.

Update

Looks like I was wrong, yes there is a program to diagnose the slowness, the program is Debug Diagnostics Tool

The DebugDiag tool is designed to assist in troubleshooting issues such as hangs, slow performance, memory leaks or memory fragmentation, and crashes in any user-mode process...

For exampleShellExView should work for you.

enter image description here

This utility works on any version of Windows, starting from Windows 98 and up to Windows 7. x64 versions of Windows are also supported.

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    Just like to add that I still had this issue in Windows 10. ShellExView worked fine and allowed me to disable menus until I found which one was causing the lag. (It seems that graphics driver context menu's are the biggest culprit, my problem was cured by disabling the Intel graphics menu TheDeskTopContextMenu Class)
    – sergeantKK
    Aug 19, 2015 at 10:17
  • Thanks for the answer, stderr. And thanks for the update @sergeantKK.
    – Coldblackice
    Jul 9, 2019 at 5:42
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    How would I use "Debug Diagnostics Tool" for this purpose?
    – skjerns
    Mar 8 at 10:01
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While ShellEx half-works for Windows10 items, the contents of shell (non x) are not shown, so you may have to visit that with Regedit and (Backup) then try removing entries (like Git or visual studio code)

locations

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\shell
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\AllFilesystemObjects\shell
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