Very slow startup since last Windows 7 Update (14.03.59 x64)

[greyfairer]

Hi all,

I'm not sure what exactly triggered this, but since a few days, Take Command takes like 20 seconds to start up. This occurred in TC 13.03 x64, but upgrading to 13.04 didn't help.
I just installed an evaluation version of TC 14.03.59 x64, and have exactly the same behaviour.

I let Process Explorer have a look at it, and during those 20 seconds, one CallHtmlHelp thread took all my CPU, mostly waiting for the TranslateMessageEx call (see attached screenshot).

This certainly didn't happen before, so I assume it's got to do with some windows dll that got updated via Windows Update. I'm using Windows 7.
My most recent updates were http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2574819, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2592687 and http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2796590.

Any ideas?

 

[rconn]

I can't reproduce that here (with the latest Windows updates).

Take Command doesn't call the CallHtmlHelp API unless you explicitly ask it to (i.e., with an F1 or Help menu click).

Does TCC.EXE start normally?

 

[greyfairer]

TCC.EXE starts normally, and fast.

I just uninstalled both Take Command 13.03 and 14 and installed the 14 again, but the issue remains.

I did not click help in any way, I just started up Take Command and clicked on the 'Continue' button for the evaluation period.

 

[rconn]

Do you have any mapped network drives?

The only thing that I'm aware of that can cause a slow TCMD startup is if you have mapped network drives that are unavailable when your start TCMD. In that situation, Windows can take a long time before it gives up on accessing the network drive, and the TCMD Folders view will take a long time to finish updating. (I've made a change in the upcoming v15 to not try to populate the Folders view until it is visible, so if you have it disabled or set to autohide it won't affect the TCMD startup speed.)

 

[Frank]

Do you have any mapped network drives?

The only thing that I'm aware of that can cause a slow TCMD startup is if you have mapped network drives that are unavailable when your start TCMD. In that situation, Windows can take a long time before it gives up on accessing the network drive, and the TCMD Folders view will take a long time to finish updating.
...

Yes, sometimes I have this problem, too. It is not a TCMD but a Windows-"Problem". Is there a way to speed up the process or shorten the delay?

 

[rconn]

Yes, sometimes I have this problem, too. It is not a TCMD but a Windows-"Problem". Is there a way to speed up the process or shorten the delay?

I'm not aware of any way to tell Windows to reduce its timeout delay when waiting on mapped drives.

 

[Frank]

OK.

 

[thedave]

I'm not aware of any way to tell Windows to reduce its timeout delay when waiting on mapped drives.

Is there any way you could accomplish this in a non-blocking way (separate thread that reports on the status of drives, which passes the information off to the main thread?)

 

[rconn]

Is there any way you could accomplish this in a non-blocking way (separate thread that reports on the status of drives, which passes the information off to the main thread?)

Only if Microsoft sends me the source code to their tree and list view controls.

 

[SiggyBar]

I am having the same problem as described by greyfairer (I also run Windows 7 and I see similar calls to CallHtmlHelp() in Process Explorer).

The problem started after I had a somewhat unclean shutdown of TCMD LE version 10. The Take Command Help window was open and I had just run a program that had left one of the TCC terminals in a bad state (for every second key I hit I would hear a terminal beep). Closing TCMD took a long time, and every time after that TCMD has been really slow to start up again.

I uninstalled TCMD LE version 10 and installed TCMD version 15, but the slow startup did not go away - normally TCMD starts up in less than a second, but now it takes around 11 seconds. Once the TCMD window comes up it quickly flickers 3-4 times (this also happens for the TCMD icon on the Windows Taskbar).

I have re-installed TCMD version 15 a few times, and after uninstalling it I have deleted all TCMD related information I could find in the Windows Registry and in %LOCALAPPDATA%\JPSoft, but it is still slow after installing it again. TCC starts very quickly like normal. I have no network drives. I have tried to delete the .chm files in the TCMD15 directory, but the results are the same.

(I have actually had a similar issue before, but that was related to Microsoft Security Essentials. Once I added tcmd.exe to MSE's excluded files list that problem disappeared.)

Is it possible to enable some internal logging in TCMD in order to track down this problem?