Significant Delay between clicking program icon and it opening?

[Polish3d]

Since yesterday, for some reason, every time I click on any program icon, including IE, it takes roughly 30-50 seconds for it to open. I've tried restarting my PC a number of times, defragging, etc

I'm running an e6600 w/ 2 gigs of ram and raptor HDDs

Any ideas on a cause and a fix?

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: Polish3d
Any ideas on a cause and a fix?

Malware maybe

 

[Polish3d]

Thanks. I downloaded Microsoft's anti-Malware program which predictably found nothing, but then I downloaded another program called Malwarebyte's anti-Malware and it found 2 instances which I removed.

The problem hasn't been fixed yet though. It's kind of strange. For the first few minutes after a restart, programs seem to open at proper speed. Then about 2 minutes in, things start taking 30-50 seconds to come up after I click on the icon

 

[Blain]

You ran Malwarebytes in "Safe Mode", correct?

 

[Polish3d]

Yes, both in safe mode and regular. Everything found (there were 3 total) has been deleted, but the problem remains. It's really strange. No matter what programs I have running, whether 1 instance of IE or 5, everything runs smoothly until roughly 1-2 minutes after restart, and then it begins to bog down, taking around 50 seconds to load any program

 

[RebateMonger]

A problem like that is usuall software-related, either a badly misbehaving program or malware. Just to make sure it's not hardware, though, check the System Event Log and look for NTFS or Disk errors.

 

[Polish3d]

Any ideas on finding the responsible culprit? I've reinstalled IE, my video drivers, etc... I'd like to avoid a reformat if possible, but if I don't fix it I'll have to

The problem is there whether I'm running IE or something else, and no IE

 

[Ksyder]

What about killing any startup processes that might be sucking up cpu cycles? Did anything change that might have caused this?

 

[Polish3d]

That's what I've been trying to figure out. Another virus scanner program found another trojan and presumably removed it. I removed all startup programs using msconfig, and canceled all non-MS services

The strange thing is that everything runs briskly for about one minute upon startup, and then it begins to bog

 

[Polish3d]

Ok, looks like I fixed it. Credit goes to avast! anti-virus trial which found and deleted a malware prog. This was the third anti-virus program I used, and I have to note that Microsoft's anti-malware program (which I used first) declared my system free of any malware/virus'