Add or Remove programs very slow in populating list

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.perform_maintain (More info?)

4 Ways to Speed Up Your Computer's Performance
http://www.microsoft.com/atwork/getstarted/speed.mspx

--
Carey Frisch
Microsoft MVP
Windows XP - Shell/User
Microsoft Newsgroups

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Tony Nunan" wrote:

| My Add or Remove Programs has become very sluggish, and takes 10+ minutes to
| display the list of programs.
|
| I have a fair amount installed, but I wouldn't think enough to cause this.
|
| Does anyone have any ideas what might be the cause and how to fix it?
|
| Thanks,
|
| Tony

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.perform_maintain (More info?)

Thanks for your ideas, but no change.

The computer itself is not sluggish, just the population of the Add/Remove
programs list. Whilst waiting for it to load there is no discernable disc
activity, and cpu usage is < 4%.

"Carey Frisch [MVP]" wrote:

> 4 Ways to Speed Up Your Computer's Performance
> http://www.microsoft.com/atwork/getstarted/speed.mspx
>
> --
> Carey Frisch
> Microsoft MVP
> Windows XP - Shell/User
> Microsoft Newsgroups
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> "Tony Nunan" wrote:
>
> | My Add or Remove Programs has become very sluggish, and takes 10+ minutes to
> | display the list of programs.
> |
> | I have a fair amount installed, but I wouldn't think enough to cause this.
> |
> | Does anyone have any ideas what might be the cause and how to fix it?
> |
> | Thanks,
> |
> | Tony
>

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.perform_maintain (More info?)

It seems to have mended itself!!

As far as I can tell what cured it was that I clicked on the 'My Music'
folder and the 'HighMAT CD writer' (?) was (re) installed. After that
everything appears in 10 seconds or so.
Hope it stays fixed!!!

Tony

"TonyNunan" <TonyNunan@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:80FB9DE9-D471-4213-86BA-FEF693CE8EF5@microsoft.com...
> Thanks for your ideas, but no change.
>
> The computer itself is not sluggish, just the population of the Add/Remove
> programs list. Whilst waiting for it to load there is no discernable disc
> activity, and cpu usage is < 4%.
>
> "Carey Frisch [MVP]" wrote:
>
>> 4 Ways to Speed Up Your Computer's Performance
>> http://www.microsoft.com/atwork/getstarted/speed.mspx
>>
>> --
>> Carey Frisch
>> Microsoft MVP
>> Windows XP - Shell/User
>> Microsoft Newsgroups
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> "Tony Nunan" wrote:
>>
>> | My Add or Remove Programs has become very sluggish, and takes 10+
>> minutes to
>> | display the list of programs.
>> |
>> | I have a fair amount installed, but I wouldn't think enough to cause
>> this.
>> |
>> | Does anyone have any ideas what might be the cause and how to fix it?
>> |
>> | Thanks,
>> |
>> | Tony
>>

Have you tried Uninstall Tool? It works like a charm - immediatelly.

Hey guys,

Removing the /3GB switch made my add/remove programs stop lagging on for 10-15 minutes before I could remove something. Now it’s just 30 seconds - 1 minute, which is tolerable.

Here’s how to remove the switch:
1) Press [Windows Key] + [Pause]
2) Click Advanced
3) Under “Startup and Recovery” click Settings
4) Click Edit
5) Boot.ini will open in an editor. Remove the switches /3gb and /USERVA=XXXX
6) Save & exit the editor, click OK, click OK.
7) Reboot and enjoy

FYI, you might share with others if they complain about this screen being slow.

in the registry in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software|Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall
remove all of the keys that refer to Windows updates. They all start with KB.

This will solve the problem.

Of course, you can only do this if you are sure you won't uninstall some of the updates.

You can also remove all of the folders in Windows that refer to those updates. They all start with $.

That was a 5-year old thread.

I know, but when people search for answers, this post comes up in Google.

I think I have found the answer/fix to this. I thought about it when someone mentioned corrupt files. Do a full error check. Go to "my computer" right click the C: drive (assuming C: is where Windows XP is) select "properties". Select "Tools" and click "check now" under error checking. Check both check boxes for Automatically fix errors and Scan for bad sectors, then click start. It will most likely tell you you need to restart the computer to do this. When you restart it will complete the task during boot up. It will take some time to do, maybe an hour or so.

After I did it, the add or remove progs took about 5 secs to populate, as opposed to the 5-10 minutes before. The error checking did find a couple dozen or so problems during the scan. It fixed them and all is good. Hope this works for others with this problem.

Brad

...and, in fact, however old the thread may be, the problem still persists, and your solution still works. I had 104 programs listed, and they took 5 minutes 14 seconds to populate. I deleted the over-200 KB files in the registry, and now it takes 4 seconds. Well done, ruudtes!

Lenny

Thanks for this post. Just to confirm, you mean using regedt32 to right click on each of those folders, like KB2079403, and select Delete. Then goto the C:\windows directory and delete all of the folders beginning with $, like $NtUninstallKB2079403$. Correct?

Just want to be sure - always a bit nervous doing things in the registry that I don't fully understand.

Thanks again.

That's how I did it. Note that this does make the updates uninstallable, but I've never needed to uninstall any of them anyway. It's been about a week now and I haven't noticed any change in the performance of my computer except, of course, for that faster population, and maybe a slight increase in boot-up speed (which wasn't bad to start with).

Add-Remove is a badly-designed program. I have a free replacement which is a lot faster...
http://aaronlawrence.fastmail.fm/AddRemove.html

Just tried out your version of AddRemove. Wow, what a difference! It does indeed load in less than a second as claimed. When I asked to modify MS Office it brought up the installer just as it was supposed to, and when I tried to remove a program I knew was already gone (but still listed) it reported a problem, same as XP's own add-remove feature. It even gave me more technical data on the program than XP did. The only thing it didn't do which XP does was offer to remove it from the program list. Fine job, Aaron!

Thanks! Good point about the error handling. There seems to be a few other tweaks that could be done - I noticed that the built-in XP one seems to hide more entries by default than mine.

Yes, your program sometimes seems to list the old and new versions with the same name when there's been an update, especially in .NET Framework files. But that's a minor foible I'm well prepared to live with.

Hi everybody
I have been searching for awhile and finally I got the answer which is not as complicated as you see everywhere.
go to your antiviruse setting .there should be an option to "Monitor file and program activity on your computer" or somthing like that, just set it for " monitoring only incoming files " instead as "existing and incoming"
good luck
Hamid