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Major problems with IE6 - UPDATE I have ntvdm - I think its like VD!

Z

Zoinks

Senior member
All of a sudden IE6 (w sp1) under WinXP (sp1) is running incredibly slow. It takes 1 minute to load with a 1.8 Ghz P4! It takes 30-45 sec to load google with cable!

It first started when after I had installed Dragon Naturally Speaking, during training. I thought I'd take a break from all that talking and surf a bit. When it took forever to load I thought it was because of the voice recognition. After finishing and closing Dragon it was still slow. I uninstalled Dragon with no help. I reinstalled windows with no effect!!!!!!!!

I notice that whenever IE is loading or doing something it is always taking 90-99% of the CPU time under the task manager. Nothing else is running slow.

The only other things I've done recently are these: today I installed and then uninstalled Nimo's codecs. I didn't notice any problems then. Yesterday I installed an Audigy 2 without any problems.

Short of downloading Netscape (yuck) I don't even know what to try!!!!
 
Ok, I started killing processes to see if something else was causing the problem and I discovered this:

Killing ntvdm.exe fixes everything. Apparently ntvdm.exe has something to do with NT Virtual DOS Machine - whatever that is. Killing it also kills its two subprocesses MONWOW.EXE (something to do with Norton cleansweep) and WOWEXEC.EXE (no clue).

Can anyone tell me what is ntvdm, do I need it, do these subprocesses do anything of value, and how do I get rid of it!?!?!
 
NTVDM is what runs legacy 16-bit DOS and Win16 apps, and even though it shouldn't be necessary it is. At the very least it'll break Installshield installers, they're 16-bit.
 
Zoinks why don't you just restore to a point when all this was not happening? I did this a couple of times and solved problems without any other intervention on my part.
 
nimo codec's screw things up, only way I've seen to get it back to normal is to either use the restore point you made before installing them or format. Its screws IE and media player to hell
 
I guess so!!!

Uninstalling Clean Sweep helped - IE is noticably slow but at least it is usable now. Nothing else has done any good. Unfortunately, reinstalling windows seems to have cleared out my restore points. I wish I had thought of restoring sooner. The only thing I have left to try is to format and reinstall windows from scratch.

You can be sure I will be steering clear of Nimo's codecs!
 
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