It's a 1T drive and has music files on it, not system. I'll have to watch if the sector count increases. Right now CDI for reallocated sectors reads Current=100, Worst=100, Threshold=36.
As I explained previously, and please correct me if I misunderstand, since there's no desktop icons now showing in Safe Mode, there's no way to test icon responsiveness for comparison. My understanding is that a clean boot is also best done in Safe Mode.
Try this- as you've no icons in safe mode, can you view your desktop folder in explorer or anything else?
What do you see?
Clean boot is not the same as safe mode. Essentially it's normal mode, but you can variously inhibit services, drivers and startups. A lot more is running, including your normal graphics drivers.
Safe Mode is, generally speaking but not always, Windows only - nothing extra.
You can configure a clean boot in either mode using msconfig.
Problems with explorer (which renders your desktop, control panel etc) may be related to shell extensions- hence the rest of what I mentioned.
In Safe Mode, I see the folders and everything else as normal, and programs and other files open with a single click. Since the clean boot takes a bit more work, I'll get to it sometime soon. For now, screenshot of desktop in Safe Mode (I have a feeling this iconless desktop was caused by the Tweaking.com utility suggested on another thread for dealing with a variety of 1607 problems).
I'm beginning to think this may be a permissions issue or a corrupt user profile, but that's just a guess. I know the tool you mean - it is very cautious if you follow all the preliminary steps.
Did you simply run it with all repairs selected?
Can I check what you did... in Safe Mode, what I meant was - if you launch explorer, and browse to your desktop folder, can you see the shortcuts etc you expect to be present on your desktop? Can you confirm that's what you did?
Another thing to try is to create a new user for test purposes. Check the desktop and shortcuts there.
If things are ok in one user but not another, you have a corrupted user profile.
I just did a user profile fix (not in Safe Mode). Icons I tried are currently opening on one click in anywhere from 4-5 secs to 90, which obviously isn't normal. Double clicks open immediately typically.
Tweaking.com - I thought I had, but didn't do the first power kill step. In any case, when it was done it had reset dozens of file type associations. Took a good hour to fix and still don't know if I got them all.
Here's part of the Desktop folder in Safe Mode/Windows Explorer:
Ok, so you can see the icons in explorer, but they are not displayed on the desktop. And I understand you to say these respond quickly.
So try creating a new user profile - of course you won't see the same set of icons etc but if you've installed some things as All users with desktop icons you may see those.
You can also examine the permissions of shortcuts as viewed in your screenshot: example from mine:
I set up a second account (local) and most of the program icons are on it. Of the several I tried, they all responded just as slowly as on my main (administrator) account.
That was in normal mode presumably.
Can you post a screenshot of your task manager in normal mode when your PC is nominally idle?
Also, try to do the same during the time when waiting for the PC to respond to clicking a shortcut. For that you will need to have the task manager open, click the shortcut, and PrtSc or similar the whole screen.
Also download and run Crystal DiskMark, and run that on each drive.
In safe mode, try this:
Right click on your desktop
Click VIEW
Then select SHOW DESKTOP ITEMS
Your last comparatively easy option is to investigate clean boot configurations, and try to get the same responsiveness you have in Safe Mode from the shortcuts you viewed in explorer by disabling startups and services.
I.e. by a process of elimination try to find an installed program that is causing the delay.
However, it would remain a puzzle as to why your shortcuts are not appearing on your safe mode desktop.
You might get some ideas by searching generally and in this forum for (e.g.)
shortcuts slow to respond
slow response when clicking shortcuts
etc
What I fear is that all this effort will just point to the inevitable conclusion: you have a corrupted user profile.. but worse, you can't create a good user profile.
"The owner only had two users (with Admin priv) and a guest account. And the User account was corrupted. What made it so hard to find was that this corruption didn't really affect anything other than the time it took to open windows specific shortcut files on the desktop. There was no crashing or other anomalies."
Resolved - Very slow access to various Windows Desktop shortcuts | WindowsBBS
(Very old thread, similar symptoms, different edition of Windows)
Last edited by dalchina; 08 Feb 2017 at 05:24.
Thanks for the suggestions and those links. Right now, I've got Trend Micro's House Call running, 883 minutes going (66%), in preparation for trying Tweaking.com again, this time the right way. To summarize, here are the two, maybe three post-1607 update symptoms that are causing problems:
1) restarts sometimes hang in the closing or start up phase, but then restart fine after the computer is powered down;
2) desktop icons respond very slowly to a single click, if at all, but typically respond quickly to a double click (setting = single); and
3) (not sure yet if this has been fixed) XYplorer file manager going not responding at a certain point and then bringing down eveything else with it (I've gone back a couple of versions to find out more, as someone else had a related problem and the developer wants to see if we can isolate it).
I have xyplorer 15.9 on mine- although I rarely use it, no problems noted.
If it's not user profile corruption (as reported elsewhere) that's affecting your desktop icons - which might be borne out in that you found the same with a second user, then clean boot and shellexview might seem the way to go. Unfortunate you've no shortcuts on the desktop in safe mode, another puzzle.
Very puzzling this mix of symptoms.
I'm wondering if there's some graphic driver issue... sometimes odd GUI issues are found to be that.
And do you have any odd manufacturer's utility programs installed?
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