Right Click or Opening a File taking approximately nine hours?
We recently brought a new server online and rotated out our old file server. The file server is CentOS running samba so we just rsync’d everything over, made sure the users and groups were good, etc. et al. Ever since the switchover…which also accompanied bringing another server online and switching over to McAfee just to make troubleshooting more fun, Right Clicking on anything in Windows is extremeley slow and takes about three times the amount of patience I have.
Was it McAfee? Was it Samba? We have systematically been testing and ruling things out and guess what the culprit turned out to be? The registry? Are you kidding me? I wish I was, but the problem was that there were so many entries in the registry to network paths that no longer existed that Windows was not happy about it.
If you are experiencing the same problem (or another test we did was to create a file named test.txt on the desktop and simply open it…that took about 45 seconds to open a blank text file) here are the steps to fix it:
1. Run Regscan searching for old server name
2. select all (ctrl a)
3. right click > Export selected items (ctrl + E)
4. save the file
5. to run the file quickly do start > run > type “notepad” and drag the reg file into the open window of notepad
6. do a search and replace in the file
7. search for [HKEY
8. replace with [-HKEY (this will delete each reg key)
9. save the file
10. don’t double click it yet unless you are way more patient than me
11. start > run
12. drag the reg file into the run window and click enter
13. select yes at prompt, then ok at the confirmation prompt
14. do a rescan to verify items have been removed
Grab a cold beverage and consider the problem fixed.
Tags: random, registry, windows
