slowdown after latest update batch?

Is it just me, or is anyone else experiencing a severe system slowdown
in XP as well as Vista, after last week's update batch?


After rebooting, and even after sleep and resume, the first time
Vista's windows explorer is started, it takes about 20 seconds from
when the window is displayed until anything shows up in the folder
treeview. The file pane (right) is displayed immediately when the
window appears, just like it used to.

Similar loss of speed in some other applications as well. This
afternoon, it took close to a full minute for a _small_ VB.Net app to
start up on XP. That was long after booting, when the machine had
just been sitting idle for a couple of hours, but it was the first
..Net based app that was started.

The same app used to start in a few seconds.
It's not because of old/slow hardware: 3.2 GHz processor, 2 GB of RAM
and a fast harddisk.

What the VB app and explorer have in common: they both scan all disks
to display a drive/folder list at startup. It's on two different
machines, so it's not a disk that's gone defective or so either.


I was first blaming it on my antivirus (Trend Micro's OfficeScan), but
disabling that only gave a speed increase of about 10%.

Yes, I have three clients that started complaining about slow systems this
week. I'm looking at all of the "usual suspects" but haven't found anything
that seems amiss.

"Lucvdv" wrote:

> Is it just me, or is anyone else experiencing a severe system slowdown
> in XP as well as Vista, after last week's update batch?
>
>
> After rebooting, and even after sleep and resume, the first time
> Vista's windows explorer is started, it takes about 20 seconds from
> when the window is displayed until anything shows up in the folder
> treeview. The file pane (right) is displayed immediately when the
> window appears, just like it used to.
>
> Similar loss of speed in some other applications as well. This
> afternoon, it took close to a full minute for a _small_ VB.Net app to
> start up on XP. That was long after booting, when the machine had
> just been sitting idle for a couple of hours, but it was the first
> ..Net based app that was started.
>
> The same app used to start in a few seconds.
> It's not because of old/slow hardware: 3.2 GHz processor, 2 GB of RAM
> and a fast harddisk.
>
> What the VB app and explorer have in common: they both scan all disks
> to display a drive/folder list at startup. It's on two different
> machines, so it's not a disk that's gone defective or so either.
>
>
> I was first blaming it on my antivirus (Trend Micro's OfficeScan), but
> disabling that only gave a speed increase of about 10%.
>

A mere slow down would be nice compared to what I'm dealing with.

Here's the basics:
XP Pro SP2
Pentium 4 3.0Ghz
2.5GB RAM

Shortly after the system starts, CPU usage pegs at 100% with the 'System'
process using all of it. I had to uninstall KB927779 just to get the task
manager to come up so I could find out what was going on. By opening Windows
Explorer, the consumption of CPU time begins immediately.

So, I looked at some performance counters -
Page Faults/sec: Average - 2200/sec Max - 19130/sec
The Disk Queue Length is still below 1.0

Something is definately wrong. I uninstalled all the updates I applied
today, but no success. I even tried a System Restore to a point before the
updates, that's not working.

I'm going to try some other options, will see what happens.