Speeding up Windows Start Menu redraws

Posted by: tfabris

Speeding up Windows Start Menu redraws - 09/05/2003 16:54

In both Windows 2000 and Windows 98, sometimes when I open up a sub-menu of the start menu (say, Start/Programs/Audio), the icons needed to paint the menu aren't cached. So instead of drawing the item names and filling in the icons later, the system briefly but irritatingly locks up while the hard disk churns and Explorer re-loads the list of icons before drawing the menu.

This happens far too frequently for my tastes. For instance, more than once per day. I don't know why it happens at all, let alone with such irritating frequency.

Are there any work-arounds to prevent this "freeze"? When I open a menu I want it to just be there, whether the icons are in the cache or not. In fact, to work around this, I'd happily give up having icons in the start menu at all. Just the names would be fine. Does anyone know of a way to do this?
Posted by: BartDG

Re: Speeding up Windows Start Menu redraws - 09/05/2003 17:13

I don't know if this is really what you're looking for, but I've used microsoft's tweak UI (part of the powertoys) to set my menu speeds to the highest speed available. This results in blazing fast menus and I haven't noticed any freezing or lockups ever since I've installed it.
Posted by: pgrzelak

Re: Speeding up Windows Start Menu redraws - 09/05/2003 17:15

TweakUI is great! I use it to give x-windows focus on hover characteristics to my mouse.
Posted by: tfabris

Re: Speeding up Windows Start Menu redraws - 09/05/2003 20:18

I already use TweakUI to speed up the menu delays and remove the transition effects. I'm not talking about stuff you can control with TweakUI.

I'm talking about when, say, a menu of 20 items is already "painting" on the screen, and the first ten items appear, and then there is a freeze half way through the painting routine as it re-loads the icon resource for menu item number 11. It's gotta go all the way out to the EXE file for that item, scan into the file to load the icon resource, copy the resouce to the icon cache, then render the icon onto the menu before it can finish painting the remaining 10 menu items and let me select one.

Surely someone else has noticed this happening sometimes?
Posted by: msaeger

Re: Speeding up Windows Start Menu redraws - 09/05/2003 20:32

On my start menu all the icons just pop up at once even when I click all programs and that is up to two pages (I need to clean)
Posted by: robricc

Re: Speeding up Windows Start Menu redraws - 09/05/2003 20:33

This happens on my machine at work. But I attribute it to having too much crap on it and Windows being stale. I run the video at 1280x1024 and there are enough programs on it to fill the screen when the 'Programs' menu is fully extended. It's also been through a marathon of Windows versions.
  • Windows NT 4.0 Dual processor
  • Windows NT 4.0 Single processor (can't recall how I got NT to downgrade)
  • Windows 2000 Pro
  • Windows XP Pro

    All those Windows upgrades probably screwed it up good. Not to mention going from IE 2 to 6. Every computer I use that is faster than a 400MHz Pentium II seems to handle large 'Programs' lists pretty well. My 800MHz laptop has a ton of crap on it and it doesn't choke.

    I would assume you have DMA access enabled in Windows on your hard drives and IDE drivers loaded. Could just be that your hard drive is slow as hell too. If all that checks out, I suggest you wipe your machine (something I do often on my personal machines). You may not want to hear that though.
    • Posted by: tonyc

    Re: Speeding up Windows Start Menu redraws - 09/05/2003 21:26

    If you don't mind running extra software to replace your Start menu, there's PaneKiller. It's got a bunch of other features, but at the minimum, it should provide a much snappier Start menu.

    I ran it a year or two ago, so I'm not sure how it is these days. But it wasn't a memory or CPU hog at the time.
    Posted by: tfabris

    Re: Speeding up Windows Start Menu redraws - 09/05/2003 22:00

    Thanks, Tony, I'll see if I like PaneKiller.
    Posted by: Dignan

    Re: Speeding up Windows Start Menu redraws - 09/05/2003 22:45

    I'm having a hard time visualizing what's happening here. For example, when you place the cursor over Start>Programs, it takes a long time for all the icons and folders to load?
    Posted by: tfabris

    Re: Speeding up Windows Start Menu redraws - 09/05/2003 23:16

    I'm having a hard time visualizing what's happening here. For example, when you place the cursor over Start>Programs, it takes a long time for all the icons and folders to load?
    Not over Start>Programs, because that's just a parent folder of other folders. The problem always happens at the next level down, where I've got a menu full of programs with different icons. Often, one of those icons isn't in the icon cache, and has to be re-loaded before the menu will fully render and be clickable.

    I've created an animated GIF file illustrating the problem. Click here to view it.
    Posted by: lectric

    Re: Speeding up Windows Start Menu redraws - 09/05/2003 23:31

    Jeeezum, that must have taken a lot of effort! Hehehe
    Posted by: tfabris

    Re: Speeding up Windows Start Menu redraws - 09/05/2003 23:34

    Jeeezum, that must have taken a lot of effort!
    Took me only 5 minutes. Faked it with one screen shot and some cuts and pastes. Not that hard, once you know the tools. Worth it to help illustrate my frustration.

    Hasn't anyone else seen their start menu do the same thing? Not all the time, just once in a while.
    Posted by: lectric

    Re: Speeding up Windows Start Menu redraws - 09/05/2003 23:52

    Actually, I have seen it, but only after a great while of sitting idle. And it very rarely lasts for more than a few microseconds, but it IS noticeable.
    Posted by: andy

    Re: Speeding up Windows Start Menu redraws - 10/05/2003 03:02

    Yeah, I see it quite often.
    Posted by: Roger

    Re: Speeding up Windows Start Menu redraws - 10/05/2003 03:49

    If you extract the icons from the EXE files, and then make the shortcuts in the menu use these instead, it'll probably be quicker to load the icons from .ico files, rather than having to go searching in the .exe for them.
    Posted by: Dignan

    Re: Speeding up Windows Start Menu redraws - 10/05/2003 07:32

    No, I've never seen that before. All my subfolders of the Program folder load instantly, but I also don't have as many items in any of those folders as you do in that sample one. I think I have a different organizational system for my start menu
    Posted by: tfabris

    Re: Speeding up Windows Start Menu redraws - 10/05/2003 09:10

    If you extract the icons from the EXE files
     I had considered this, but I think that would be putting a band-aid on the problem. The root of the problem is the fact that the icon cache doesn't have the necessary icon when it's needed.

    I seem to remember that the desktop icons are stored in a file called "shelliconcache". Are the menu icons stored in this same file? Anyone know? TweakUI can force a rebuild of this file, but I don't know whether that would affect things or not.
    Posted by: bootsy

    Re: Speeding up Windows Start Menu redraws - 10/05/2003 12:22

    Just a silly idea, but how often do you defrag? I've been using "O&O Defrag" and it does a wonderful job. The best part is you can use it in the MMC and it will defrag system files at startup.

    If you have a large hard drive, and your programs are scattered all over it, that might be aggravating your problem.
    Posted by: tfabris

    Re: Speeding up Windows Start Menu redraws - 22/05/2003 20:14

    Finally installed PaneKiller tonight and messed with it.

    SWEEEEEEET.

    Took a lot of tweaking to get it looking right and behaving the way I wanted it to behave, but the beauty of it is that it is so tweakable.

    And it has a very clear setting on the first page, which was "on" by default: "Fetch icons in background". This is of course the very thing that the Windows Start menu does NOT do and was the source of my complaint.

    Oh, and tear-off menus are too fun.
    Posted by: Taym

    Re: Speeding up Windows Start Menu redraws - 23/05/2003 03:22

    I seem to remember that the desktop icons are stored in a file called "shelliconcache". Are the menu icons stored in this same file? Anyone know? TweakUI can force a rebuild of this file, but I don't know whether that would affect things or not.
    That's correct. I attached a .reg file that increases ths size of the icon cache file to 2048 from the default (1024). You can edit it (like all .reg it is a simple txt file) and change it to whatever value you prefer.
    If you want, you can edit manually windows' registry. Here's what's in the .reg file I attached: 


    REGEDIT4

    

    [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\explorer]

    "Max Cached Icons"="2048"


    This should solve your problem
    Posted by: tonyc

    Re: Speeding up Windows Start Menu redraws - 23/05/2003 05:37

    Cool, glad Panekiller works for ya. Yeah, those are the kind of programs I like, the ones that have lots of tweakability and configuration options. If I install a program and it "just works" without any tweaking, I probably won't keep it around very long.
    Posted by: tfabris

    Re: Speeding up Windows Start Menu redraws - 23/05/2003 08:28

    That's correct. I attached a .reg file that increases ths size of the icon cache file to 2048 from the default (1024).
    NOW he tells me. After I switched to PaneKiller.

    I may still do this just to see if it also solves the problem.
    Posted by: Taym

    Re: Speeding up Windows Start Menu redraws - 24/05/2003 09:41

    Sorry for the delay Too much on the empeg bbs to keep track of everything, so I read threads constantly late...
    If you try the .reg let me know if it works, Tony. I never had your problem, so I am just assuming it may be the solution.
    Posted by: tfabris

    Re: Speeding up Windows Start Menu redraws - 27/05/2003 15:56

    For the record, I think Taym's registry entry has solved the problem on my Win2k box at work. Only time will tell, but I think that all menu redraws are now at video/memory speed and no longer hit the hard disk. I used 5192 as my value.
    Posted by: Taym

    Re: Speeding up Windows Start Menu redraws - 28/05/2003 01:17

    Happy to hear this, Tony.
    One more proof that RAM is never enough... (yes, yes, ok, with MS at least ).
    Posted by: tracerbullet

    Re: Speeding up Windows Start Menu redraws - 28/05/2003 20:38

    I would love to try this but have no such entry in my XP-Pro registry. Any ideas where it would be?

    (Not in the location mentioned, and nothing turned up searching either)
    Posted by: tfabris

    Re: Speeding up Windows Start Menu redraws - 28/05/2003 20:56

    On both my Windows 2000 computer as well as my Windows 98 computer, I had to add that registry entry.

    I do not know if Windows XP even has a problem with startmenu redraws or not. Are you saying you want to add it to XP because you are having the same experience?
    Posted by: Taym

    Re: Speeding up Windows Start Menu redraws - 29/05/2003 07:10

    have no such entry in my XP-Pro registry

    Yes, you need to add it. Simply, get the .reg file I attached and double click on it. Accept the changes and you're set. You may have to reboot.
    Posted by: tracerbullet

    Re: Speeding up Windows Start Menu redraws - 29/05/2003 18:19

    I just want to add it so I "don't" have the same experience!

    Basically I can't stop screwing with things, I'm one of those people... Actually there are many things in life that I'm very cautious and reserved on, but PC stuff, that I learn here, I just HAVE to try out.

    I've runt he reg addition, thanks - not sure if I'll ever see a difference, but cool to know I'm tweaked even a little further
    Posted by: tfabris

    Re: Speeding up Windows Start Menu redraws - 29/05/2003 21:29

    I just want to add it so I "don't" have the same experience!
    You have to be careful about doing that kind of thing. For all I know, XP might have a 8192k default limit on the shelliconcache file, and you could actually be hurting performance by adding the registry entry.
    Posted by: drakino

    Re: Speeding up Windows Start Menu redraws - 02/06/2003 22:08

    And it has a very clear setting on the first page, which was "on" by default: "Fetch icons in background". This is of course the very thing that the Windows Start menu does NOT do and was the source of my complaint.
    For the record, it looks like the Start Panal in XP does get the icons in the background, as I found out on this bootup. I hit the start button, and saw half the icons were the generic icon, then watched as a few moments later, they started filling themselves in. I am not sure if the classic start menu does the same thing in XP, since I am a convert to the new start panal design.