Windows explorer right click hangs xp

Open the task manager and look at your process CPU usage. You can arrange them by usage by clicking on the CPU column. Watch to see if one of those processes spike when your system is hanging.

Using WXP SP3, I started having the hang on right-click in windows explorer at about the time I installed WinRAR and its context-menu options appeared. Instead of using the ShellExView, I tried an approach I saw in a different thread, and that immediately solved my problem. That is, I merely disabled the "transition effects" in menus and tooltips. In Control Panel, bring up Display. Go to the Appearance tab and click on the Effects button. Uncheck the box labeled "Use the following transition effects for menus and tooltips". Click on Apply. Then close this applet.

I found that this not only immediately eliminated the problem of the hanging (or extreme delay) when right-clicking on a folder in Windows Explorer, but it made the context menu much faster than it was when it had behaved normally. I don't miss the transition effects at all. If task manager shows an explorer window is not responding, you might want to try this approach before the others because it's so easy.

for a machine that old I would
press Windows Key + Break to open system properties
Select the advanced tab under performance click setings
Under the visual setting select best performance

Let's see, a 3 year old ThinkPad T60p with 2GB of RAM and a 2Ghz+ Duo processor that ran fine for 35.5 months without any problem with right-click hanging is suddenly such a slow machine that it cannot be expected to continue rendering the screen the way it always has?

Sorry, going back to W2K appearance isn't going to happen around here.

This problem appeared despite a recent reinstall and thorough patching of WXP, so all the crap-ware that didn't seem to cause the problem for 33 months isn't even around any more.

Oh, and a few days after I seemed to have found a solution, the problem has returned. Maybe SP3 is crap-ware too.