Weird slowdown caused by Explorer

[Eric]

I tend to keep a lot of windows open, including tons of IE tabs.
Usually OK. But I'll often encounter a problem that suddenly slows the
entire OS to a crawl. Clicking on anything in the task bar takes ages
to activate the window. I can get to active windows more quickly via
Alt-Tab, though that still requires a few seconds to come up.

Another odd symptom: Doing the usual Shift-DEL to completely delete an
item will react just like regular DEL. IOW, it asks whether to send
the items to the recycle bin--and indeed they do go there.

This could possibly be related to Youtube. Strange, but that's usually
what seems to trigger the problem. I've also noticed that an open
Youtube window will keep consuming more and more memory as it sits
there idle, so a single Youtube window can end up consuming a gigabyte
of ram or more.

The fix: I can open Task Manager and close the Explorer process. Then
go the New Task button and restart it. That seems to fix everything.

Win7-32 SP1 and IE9 are kept up to date. The machine is a decent quad
core with 4GB ram.

Has anyone seen anything like this?

 

[J. P. Gilliver (John)]

In message <[email protected]>, Eric

Another odd symptom: Doing the usual Shift-DEL to completely delete an
item will react just like regular DEL. IOW, it asks whether to send
the items to the recycle bin--and indeed they do go there. []
Has anyone seen anything like this?

I've seen the shift-del-behaving-like-ordinary-del - i. e. it says do
you want to send to the recycle bin - in Windows 98SElite; on two
separate machines, so it's not a dud shift key. Saying no and
shift-del'ing a second time usually works. I never did get to the bottom
of it, and no-one in the '98 'group had any suggestion that bore fruit
either.

I can't remember if I've seen it under XP.