Slow Icon Refresh

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Lately my system has taken to a significant slowdown in refreshing the icons on my desktop.

Can anybody advise me how to eliminate this problem?

Thanks in advance!

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First and foremost have you run antivirus/antimalware/antieveryhing scans? I use AVAST and ANTIMALWAREBYTES. F-Secure has a very good, free online scanner – http://www.f-secure.com/en_US/security/security-lab/tools-and-services/online-scanner/

What’s running in the background? Something likely is hogging CPU. You need a “start-up manager” to see what’s starting on boot as well as a task manager that shows everything that currently running, like “Process Explorer”. Be very careful disabling thigns set to startup as some are required and you could get into a really bad place if you disable the wrong thing.

Process Explorer – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

Cuper Startup Manager – http://download.cnet.com/CuperUtilities-StartUp-Manager/3000-2094_4-10778667.html

Between the two you should be able to figure out if some running app is hogging CPU.

If after going down this road you don’t find anything obvious you can update your video drivers but if it’s been running fine for some time with no issues then your drivers are most likely not your problem. You can go to your computer manufacturers website and look for more current drivers OR use PCWizard 2010 to see what video chipset you have on your motherboard then go to that companies website for drivers specific to your chipset – http://www.cpuid.com/pcwizard.php

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It could be that XP’s icon cache is damaged, or that its value in the registry is too low. (It could also be that the registry entry has been removed by a registry cleaner).
The easiest way to rebuild the icon cache is to change the screen’s “Color Quality” from 32 bit to 16 bit and back again. This is done on the Settings tab of Display Properties.
To increase the size of the icon cache, go to

Code:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionexplorer

and increase the value of “Max Icon Cache” to “4096”.
A little web searching for “increase icon cache” will give you links to REG files or scripts that will automate the process.

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Thanks for your reply.
I used your idea “A little web searching for “increase icon cache” will give you links to REG files or scripts that will automate the process. “ and found details that talked about a registry item “Max Icon Cache” that was missing. I have added it & will respond again when I have more results.

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Adding that registry entry seems to have taken care of my problem.
Any thoughts of why it should have been deleted?

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I don’t think that registry entry exists in a default XP installation. Without the registry entry, XP uses a default value of 500, which works OK until XP gets too big. The “Max Cached Icons” “Max Icon Cache” entry is only needed to make XP use a value other than 500.

[Edited to fix a silly mistake. Thanks to Terence Hines]

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Tim, did you mean to refer to two different values, “Max Cached Icons” and “Max Icon Cache,” or just one, “Max Cached Icons”?

http://support.micro…kb/132668/en-us

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Aaah… sorry… it is “Max Icon Cache”. Just the one entry.

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