Drive right-click in Explorer very slow

[Nick Payne]

When I right-click a drive letter in Windows Explorer, it takes about ten or
fifteen seconds for the popup menu to appear. This slowness is quite
consistent, and happens regardless of whether I choose the floppy drive, the
local hard disk, local CD-ROM, or mapped network drives. When right-clicking
a directory or file in Explorer there is virtually no delay before the popup
menu appears, nor is there any delay on a network share. In fact, if I have
both \\server\share and a drive mapped to \\server\share visible in
Explorer, I get the delay when I right-click on the mapped drive but not
when I right-click on the UNC share which points to the exact same location.

The machine is otherwise more than acceptably fast: Asus P4P800 motherboard,
2.4GHz P4, 1Gb RAM, 120Gb SATA drive, WinXP Pro SP1 with all current
patches.

Any suggestions on why this one operation should be so slow?

Nick

 

[Paul B T Hodges]

Do you have any applications installed that have embedded themselves in the
right click context menu ?
When you right click, does anything get offered which isn't part of windows?

Paul

 

[Nick Payne]

There are three additions to the menu: Winzip, McAfee anti-virus, WS_FTP.
However, those same three additions also display on all right-clicks, and
it's only the right-click on a drive letter that is so slow.

Nick