All Programs slow to show

Naturally you want to try Ad-aware and Spybot. If those don't work then you can try going to download.com and getting some of the free memory managers. Get one that allows you to adjust the size of the icon cache and increase the cache size.

I tried this on a W98 machine some time ago. Adjusting the icon cache size made a big difference in the time it took to load icons.

First, check your memory. Its possible that one of the modules went bad, reported the missing memory to the user, but who reads messages anyway. Check your bios settings, make sure things like the processor running in compatable mode are not enabled. Next, check the location and size of your pagefile, compair it to the other systems, follow best practices with sizing the pagefile. DEFRAGMENT the harddrive, sounds logical but I dont know how many times clients have never defraged the drive, especialy after moving around big files. Do an off line defrag to fix a fragmented MFT and pagefile. Defragmented drives also break up the registry and make it slow to load depending upon how bad the fragmentation. Check your network settings twice, look at if a WINS server or DNS server is mis-addressed. Networking issues will often slow the population of the desktop. Applications that use virtual network adapters or DHCP servers that are mis-configured will do the same. One example is vmware workstaion. Is the a desktop that is loading from a profile on the network? Check to make sure your binding orders are correct if you have multiple nics or addresses.

Pete