IE7 in Vista running horribly slow all the sudden.

[MoobyTheGoldenCalf]

I've been running Vista for weeks now without problems. My Comcast internet has been flying as usual. Then a couple days ago it started slowing down. Today it's so bad it took me 34 seconds just to load Google :shocked:

I know it's not a hardware issue because there are 2 other accounts on my PC and internet works fast as usual on them, it's just my account that's bad for some reason. Also, I am using Virtual PC 2007 to run XP under my account. Internet is normal using that under my account too.

Nothing I've tried has worked so far: Clearing temp files, system restore, I've copied the IE settings from the other accounts to mine, tried the reset advanced settings button in IE. Nothing is helping. I don't remeber changing anything or doing anything that would be causing this.

Anybody got any ideas? It feels like I'm back in 1997 running a 14.4k modem...

 

[SoundTheSurrender]

Does firefox work?

 

[MoobyTheGoldenCalf]

Originally posted by: SoundTheSurrender
Does firefox work?

Just tried it. It works perfect. Everything is popping up instantly in Firefox.

Also, I just noticed this... When I use IE7 and try to open a page, say Yahoo, my CPU utilization goes up to 100% on both cores and it just sits there chugging away at 100% for literally 25-45 seconds per page before it finishes loading. WTF is going on here :disgust:

 

[SimMike2]

I would run good spyware software and also anti-virus. It really sounds like you've been hijacked or have a trojan.

 

[MoobyTheGoldenCalf]

Originally posted by: SimMike2
I would run good spyware software and also anti-virus. It really sounds like you've been hijacked or have a trojan.

No, it's not that. I run NOD32 & Win Defender. Both full scans come up clean. I can watch my network traffic and it just trickles when loading pages. There's barely anything going through. It's the CPU utilization that's killing me. I've narrowed it down to that.

Did some more digging on google and found some other instances high CPU that were caused by bad add-ons to IE. However, that's not my problem either. I've run IE in "add-ons disabled" mode and it still does the same thing. Also tried disabling the phishing filter and nothing. This is beyond frustrating...

 

[stash]

Click the start button and type "internet". Click the IE shortcut that says No add-ons. See if browsing is still slow.

 

[MoobyTheGoldenCalf]

Originally posted by: stash
Click the start button and type "internet". Click the IE shortcut that says No add-ons. See if browsing is still slow.

I already tried running in no add-ons mode. It's no different. As soon as I try to load any page, both of my CPU cores shoot to 100% and stay there until the page finally loads, which is usually taking 30-45 seconds per page. However, the more complex, the longer it takes. I just tried Amazon and it took well over a minute to load.

I keep going back and forth between the other user account on my PC that works fine and for the life of me, I cannot see any setting in IE that is different.

 

[MoobyTheGoldenCalf]

OK, I might be getting slightly closer to the problem.

Found this page: http://mygreenpaste.blogspot.com/2006/1...e-of-sluggish-internet-explorer-7.html which describes a somewhat similar problem to mine, but this one was caused by the Phishing Filter. Anyway, I went through the same debugging techniques as this guy (using Process Explorer to trace the utilization). Here's what I came up with. Every time I access a page, IE is creating 6-8 thread instances of ntdll.dll!Rtlintegertounicodestring+0x67 with each one using 10-15% CPU utilization. So there is where my bogging down is coming from. For example, when I load amazon.com, I can watch the status bar as it loads and each one of the 60+ objects on the page gets one of these Rtlintegertounicodestring threads assigned to it for several seconds. They just keep generating over and over until the page finally loads a minute and a half later.

When I do the same test on the other (functional) user account on my PC, the ntdll.dll!Rtlintegertounicodestring+0x67 threads never go above 3% and they are gone almost instantly.

So there it is. Now, anybody know what the hell ntdll.dll!Rtlintegertounicodestring is? LOL! :laugh: Google isn't giving me much here...

 

[oldman420]

I have noticed that the phishing filter in ie7 slows things down noticeably. I disable it and that helps.

 

[MrChad]

There is an update to the phishing filter that improves performance.

 

[MoobyTheGoldenCalf]

It wasn't the phishing filter. Enabling/Disabling it made no difference. I finally ended up doing a complete PC restore to a backup a made about a week ago. Everything was working again. Then last night all of the sudden I got the problem again. Same exact thing as before. Pages take 2 minutes to load and CPU is maxed out the whole time. Ended up having to do another restore to get it working again. I'm still trying to figure out what's causing this.