Control Panel Add/Remove programs

[Ray K]

It takes 30 seconds for the first program to appear and 40 seconds for
them all to appear.(There are 161 listings, including 70 or so hotfixes
to our favorite operating system.)

The program System Mechanic Professional includes a Remove Installed
Programs uninstall tool. The first listing shows with one second and
all 161 appear before 8 seconds.

Why does CP Add/Remove programs take so long?

 

[John John (MVP)]

It takes 30 seconds for the first program to appear and 40 seconds for
them all to appear.(There are 161 listings, including 70 or so hotfixes
to our favorite operating system.)

The program System Mechanic Professional includes a Remove Installed
Programs uninstall tool. The first listing shows with one second and all
161 appear before 8 seconds.

Why does CP Add/Remove programs take so long?

Are you using a registry cleaner on your machine?

John

 

[Ray K]

Are you using a registry cleaner on your machine?

John

Yes, several in fact.

Rat

 

[John John (MVP)]

Yes, several in fact.

I see. How fast is Add/Remove Programs populated when you are in Safe-Mode?

John

 

[Ray K]

I see. How fast is Add/Remove Programs populated when you are in
Safe-Mode?

John

Still about 30 seconds until the first appear, then they all are listed
by 37 seconds. Hardly any change compared to the normal mode.

By the way, it takes 4-5 minutes to get to the desktop in the Safe Mode.
Is that typical?

Ray

 

[John John (MVP)]

Still about 30 seconds until the first appear, then they all are listed
by 37 seconds. Hardly any change compared to the normal mode.

By the way, it takes 4-5 minutes to get to the desktop in the Safe Mode.
Is that typical?

No, certainly not here. It takes about 15-20 seconds for the driver
list to scroll by and for Windows 2000 graphics to start appearing, and
at about 45 seconds I'm at a fully working safe-mode desktop. In normal
boot My Add/Remove Programs populates in less than 5 seconds, I don't
know how many programs there are in there (and I won't count them) but
there's 6 screen full of them.

I don't know how to fix your problem. I am confident that you make sure
that your computer is malware free. Look in the Event Logs and see if
there is anything relevant showing there, the Event Log should always be
one of the starting points when investigating problems, you might find
useful information there.

I don't want to tell you what to do with your computer and you can
completely dismiss my advice if you want, but I don't think that running
registry cleaners is a very good idea, and I think that running
different cleaners to catch what the other ones missed is plain and
simply a very bad idea, this is certainly not a case of more is better,
it's a case of more is even worse!

Your registry cleaning may have nothing at all do with your problems...
or it may have all to do with them, we just don't know. And therein
lies the problem with those cleaners, there is no way of knowing what
they did and solving problems on machines that have been "cleaned" is
often more of a mystery hunt than anything else, two questions that can
almost never be answered are "Is the cleaner responsible" and if it is
"What did it do?"!

John

 

[Ray K]

No, certainly not here. It takes about 15-20 seconds for the driver
list to scroll by and for Windows 2000 graphics to start appearing, and
at about 45 seconds I'm at a fully working safe-mode desktop. In normal
boot My Add/Remove Programs populates in less than 5 seconds, I don't
know how many programs there are in there (and I won't count them) but
there's 6 screen full of them.

Dramatic difference between your computer and mine.

I don't know how to fix your problem. I am confident that you make sure
that your computer is malware free. Look in the Event Logs and see if
there is anything relevant showing there, the Event Log should always be
one of the starting points when investigating problems, you might find
useful information there.

I went to Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Event Viewer. For today:

The Application Log shows lots of errors with the Source column showing
WinMgmt, Perfcts, rasctrs, PerfNet, PerfDisk, and Microsoft Internet
Explorer.

The Security Log had no entries.

The System Log shows lots of errors with the Source column showing
Service Control Manager, RasMan, RemoteAccess, and DCOM.

I don't know what these errors mean (yes, if I right-click and select
Properties, there is a techie explanation for each), how to correct
them, or even if I should try, as the computer is mostly working okay.

Here's one example of a Service Contol Manager error:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Service Control Manager
Event Category: None
Event ID: 7026
Date: 11/24/2008
Time: 4:27:23 PM
User: N/A
Computer: CLONE
Description:
The following boot-start or system-start driver(s) failed to load:
cdudf
FileDisk
FltMgr
MRxSmb
NetBIOS
NetBT
pavboot
RasAcd
Rdbss
SASDIFSV
SASKUTIL
Tcpip


Here's an example of a DCOM message:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: DCOM
Event Category: None
Event ID: 10010
Date: 11/24/2008
Time: 4:30:51 PM
User: CLONE\Any Body
Computer: CLONE
Description:
The server {E60687F7-01A1-40AA-86AC-DB1CBF673334} did not register with
DCOM within the required timeout.

An example of a RasMan message:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Rasman
Event Category: None
Event ID: 20063
Date: 11/24/2008
Time: 4:34:19 PM
User: N/A
Computer: CLONE
Description:
Remote Access Connection Manager failed to start because the Point to
Point Protocol failed to initialize. The network request is not supported.

Data:
0000: 32 00 00 00 2...

I don't want to tell you what to do with your computer and you can
completely dismiss my advice if you want, but I don't think that running
registry cleaners is a very good idea, and I think that running
different cleaners to catch what the other ones missed is plain and
simply a very bad idea, this is certainly not a case of more is better,
it's a case of more is even worse!

Your registry cleaning may have nothing at all do with your problems...
or it may have all to do with them, we just don't know. And therein
lies the problem with those cleaners, there is no way of knowing what
they did and solving problems on machines that have been "cleaned" is
often more of a mystery hunt than anything else, two questions that can
almost never be answered are "Is the cleaner responsible" and if it is
"What did it do?"!

Good points. Thanks.

Ray

 

[John John (MVP)]

I went to Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Event Viewer. For today:

The Application Log shows lots of errors with the Source column showing
WinMgmt, Perfcts, rasctrs, PerfNet, PerfDisk, and Microsoft Internet
Explorer.

It looks like you have some Performance Monitoring running or trying to
run, some of that monitoring can slow things down. The monitoring may
be perfectly legit, but in reality you don't need Performance Counters
running all the time for nothing, server administrators may keep a few
very select counters running at all times to keep an eye on critical
performance indicators but otherwise monitoring may needlessly slow down
the system. Might the monitoring/attempted monitoring be caused by
System Mechanic? I would uninstall that "thing" and see what happens.
This tool may be helpful:

Windows 2000 Resource Kit Tool : Extensible Performance Counter List
(exctrlst.exe)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...83-b7ec-4da6-92ab-793193604ba4&displaylang=en

If you have tools that you downloaded from the internet, tools that
claimed that they would increase or boost your computer performance, get
rid of them, other than getting in the way most of these things don't do
much of anything on NT operating systems, most of the time they do the
opposite of what they claim to do! If you are new to Windows
NT/2000/XP, a Windows 98 user who just recently made a move to the NT
platform, leave *all* your Windows 98 tweak tools behind! These things
might have been useful on W9x but few, if any of them, are of any use on
NT systems.

The Security Log had no entries.

The System Log shows lots of errors with the Source column showing
Service Control Manager, RasMan, RemoteAccess, and DCOM.

If your machine is a stand alone (not part of a network) disable or set
unnecessary services to Manual start. Keep a log of what you disable so
that you may reverse your actions if things don't work as expected. The
information here should be helpful:
http://www.windowsnetworking.com/kb...servicestoimproveworkstationsperformance.html

For the time being don't worry about DCOM errors, those are usually
mostly innocuous.

What is the history of your machine? Was this machine upgraded from W9x
or was it a clean install?

Being that the symptoms persist in safe-mode, and being that all
unnecessary services and third party applications are disabled in
safe-mode, this would indicate to me that there is something buried deep
inside the operating system that isn't working properly. To tell you
the truth your registry cleaning activities leave me suspicious. A
repair install may fix your problems but my usual way of dealing with
machines that have been "cleaned" is to do a new *clean* installation of
the operating system, that is the only registry cleaner that I approve
of! After doing a clean installation and telling folks to reinstall all
their applications few of the folks that I help ever use registry
cleaners again, or if they do they don't come back to see me when they
have problems!

John

 

[Ray K]

John,

I'm working my way through your suggestions.

My computer is home-built. I just did a clean install of W2K several
months ago; never a conversion from W9X. It's part of a local area
network in the sense that I'm using an internet phone through my cable
connection. The cable from the wall goes to the cable modem input; its
ethernet output goes to the WAN input on the phone modem. One phone
modem output goes to the ethernet card in my computer, the other to a
phone. No other computers on the network. Also, when I boot, I do not
have to log on, as I'm the only user.

I removed System Mechanic; no change in the number or types of error events.

One thing that might be a factor: Device Manager shows a yellow
exclamation next to something called "Other devices/PCI Simple
Communications Controller." I don't have a driver for it. If I uninstall
it, the next time I boot I get the New Hardware Found wizard and it
appears again.

One of the "optimizers" I'm using is called TCP Optimizer. Seem to make
my download speed much faster.

The most common Application Log error message is WinMgmt; its form is

"WMI ADAP was unable to create object index {NUMBER} for Performance
Library {NAME| because no value was found in the 009 subkey"

For what it's worth, I also get six MsiInstaller warnings before the
above error messages appear. They are typically something like this:

Detection of product '{C67DF120-4DD3-11D4-A3CA-005004AD2A5B}', feature
'AV_DVP' failed during request for component
'{E39DB87F-D2CB-42FF-AAA4-72E708258DC6}'

Thanks for all your patience in trying to help me. I'll work your other
ideas tomorrow. At this point, the error messages are more of an
annoyance to the purist in me than anything else, except they might be
the reason Add/Remove Programs takes so long to list them all.
Otherwise, I'm satisfied with the way the computer works. (My browser,
Sea Monkey, shuts down too often, but its NG shows that to be a common
problem with the latest revision.)

Regards,

Ray