XP - Sluggish Explorer behavior

[BatteryAcid]

I've got a friend who's having issues with XP being sluggish. All her programs run fine, but only after having been opened once. In other words, the first instance of any program she runs is being very sluggish. Simple Explorer tasks like moving a file take much longer than usual, running a program from the right clicking menu for the first time is sluggish(but only the first time). Opening a right click menu takes a very long time... other simple things like that are sluggish, too.

The machine has a P4 3.0, 512mb (or a gig, can't remember exactly) of memory, so its definately got the power to run XP without issues. I've already had her do a disk cleanup on all her drives, defragment, run Adaware, Spybot, and her antivirus suite.

Is there anything else i can have her try? Reformatting is really not something she wants to do... apparently she has some software she installed but lost the cd's for.

Thanks

 

[Direwolf20]

If you open task manager, and goto the processes tab, does it show whats using up all the CPU? (CTRL-ALT-DEL and choose task list if you get a menu)

Did she mess around with page file settings?

Anything in particular that you can recall starting this?

Seems like you've covered all the general troubleshooting stuff.

 

[OldMX]

Load windows explorer and browse to ..\windows\prefetch\ and delete all files in there, it wont hurt anything for sure it will help a lot

good luck

oldmx