A little over a week ago, my XP (HE) began to visibly slow down. For example, on startup the desktop icons would have the generic look and then slowly refresh one by one. And another example, when opening a program, it firsts displays partially and then the whole window comes up.

So, I started to troubleshoot.

First, I loaded Task Manager in an effort to see if any processes or applications were taking an unusual amount of resources. Nothing that gave me a hint there.

Next I disabled indexing for searches, 'cause I thought maybe that was slowing things down (though I had indexing on prior to this and it never slowed things down like I'm seeing in my examples above). No joy there.

Then I thought that maybe my prefetch files were gone and that was causing this, but that wasn't the case.

I've scanned for spyware and viruses, but no joy there either (for once I was hoping some malware would show up).

My swap file is fixed and defragmented, so that doesn't seem to be it either.

MS came out with a bunch of updates on the 14th, so I thought maybe it was one of them, and have been removing one by one, but still no joy there.

I've disabled all polling that some programs do for updates (like Adobe Reader and Java), thinking that perhaps that was interrupting the display . . . but no joy there either.

I did update to Java Version 6 Update 10, which is listed as a Release Candidate but is still really a beta, right around the time those MS Updates came out and when my slow problem first started, so my next step will be to either go back to Update 7, or just uninstall Java completely (I really don't use it, and only have need of it when I do the Secunia online scan for security update info).

Since beta's are essentially unfinished software, I'm thinking that maybe Update 10 could be doing it.

I'm reluctant to bash MS Updates, but they have been known to screw things up. However, on all the searches I've done I don't see anything about those updates slowing things down, so I'm thinking that the MS Updates are probably not the cause.

So . . . thoughts or ideas??

Bob, if Secunia is the only thing that you use Java for, then you should download the native Secuia PSI application for Windows here:
https://psi.secunia.com/

This way Secunia runs as a native Windows app and there is no need to open a browser window and no need to keep Java around. The only thing that you won't like is that Secunia PSI is currently at RC-3, but this program doesn't act like a beta. I think that Secunia is being overly cautious about their release types. I've been running Secunia PSI since it was beta, through RC-1 and now RC-3 and it's rock solid for me. I've said this before, but I use Secunia PSI to check for new versions of installed apps, so I don't allow any of those "polling" programs on my system. Why have an application running at all times for an update that occurs maybe once a month? And there are 5 or 6 programs on my system that would like to have their update poller always running. Not going to happen here.

http://www.howtogeek.com/forum.....post-21510
http://www.howtogeek.com/forum.....replies=11

BobJam,

Yes, Spybot was one of them and the version was whichever one was current 4 months ago (1.5?). Other hosts files came attached with (and i'm guessing now) Spyware Blaster and Advanced WindowsCare.

I can't really explain how or why my slowness started when it did but you read about my solution. The Geek offered up an explanation and that's when I stopped worrying about it ;) I use Firefox exclusively and whether the browser was part of the cause, or just effect, I sincerely do not know.