File Explorer slow and Start menu icons not highlighting after update

Hi Youssu,

Keep us informed...

Sad to say, it's doing it again. My machine was just locked up for about 5-10 minutes. All 8 cores were showing at 98% activity, nothing worked. I tried starting the performance recorder, but couldn't get anything to respond. Windows Explorer died, the taskbar went black, nothing was responsive. I could see the system process in Task Manager at the top of the list in the Details tab. I have them sorted by CPU usage, the window was still visible when the activity happened, and the odd times it refreshed, this process was at the top.

It's come back to life now, but no doubt it will do it again.

I can't work like this. It's killing my machine. I can't say I'm keen on disabling the service, as system restore and backup seem to depend on it, and it seems that there's something fundamentally wrong if such a basic part of the OS is crippling my machine. Surely there must be a better answer.

Any ideas? Thanks again.

zinou? Anyone?

Hi Youssou
i can't answer right now. I'm a bit sick. I have an idea to identify which program is creating this shadow copies by using process monitor.
Talk soon.

Thanks for letting me know. I hope you feel better soon (for you as much as for me!)

Have you tried to backup With file history, when VSS.exe service is disabled. I'm not sure that File history rely on VSS to do the backup job !

Hi zinou, hope you're feeling better.

As I said in my reply of the 4th Dec, I have the VSS service running, it was just killing my machine.

However, someone (elsewhere) suggested running Windows install (I used the Media Creation Tool, as I didn't have my installation disk handy), and that seems to have done the trick. I'm not holding my breath, but all seems back to normal now.

Thanks again for all the help. Unless the symptoms start again, I guess we'll have to write this off to one of those Windows things!

Do you mean you have done a fresh Installation of Windows 10 ?

I'm having the same issues where file explorer and other programs are taking a long time to load. Restarting would fix it but then it would get slower over time. Hope to hear back for any updates!

I used the MCT, which effectively reinstalls Windows, but it leaves all your files and applications in place. All that was affected were a few minor settings, like custom icons on some folders, default view for some folders, etc. Didn't suffer anything more serious than that.

Warning: It took almost 2 hours to do the repair, so set it off when you don't want to use the machine. Was worth the wait though. It all works like before now.

Hope that helps.