Monday, February 25, 2008

Vista SP1 Fixes a Problem

A weird issue cropped up on my system a couple of weeks ago. Because of when it occurred, I'm pretty sure it was caused by a patch installed by Windows Update. The problem: opening Windows Explorer or an Open File dialog took about 30 seconds. The problem was worse when I was connected to our LAN and a little better when undocked. It didn't matter whether it was for a local drive or network drive; it still took an annoying amount of time to see the window or dialog.

I did some research on this and tried turning off the sharing violation notification delay as noted at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/889588. Even more weird, that fixed the problem for a couple of hours, but then it went back to the horrible delay.

Finally, I decided to install Vista SP1 (available next month via Windows Update but available now for MSDN subscribers) and see if that helped. Installation was easy: create a system restore point just in case, start the process, go for lunch, done when I got back. And I'm happy to report that the problem has gone away: Windows Explorer comes up very quickly for both local and network drives now.

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