[jeroenhd]

Every time I've investigated an issue like this, it was something outside of explorer. Most of the time some kind of plugin that I didn't want (PDF readers, Tortoise SVN/Git, document preview handlers, you name it), mapped network drives not responding, or file system corruption that went by seemingly unnoticed.

At some point I started Autoruns and just disabled every DLL that didn't come from Microsoft and that I didn't strictly need. It sped up Windows immensely, and I went back enabling maybe one or two of those DLLs at a later point because it broke functionality.

I could've saved weeks of my life if Microsoft had just added a little popup that says "7zip.dll is adding 24% extra time to opening right click menus, disable it Y/N" every time a badly programmed plugin slowed down my shell.

[chubot]

Yup, back when I used windows, my solution to software rot was “just don’t install things that aren’t absolutely essential”

Same goes for OS X now — it seems every OS grows incomprehensible to the company that makes it

Which is sad, because one of the main functions of an OS should be to protect you from misbehaving applications

Linux is a bit better, but I think even the Debian GUI suffers from trying to be convenient/magic rather than predictable/robust