Windows 10 Start Menu, Taskbar and Native Apps frustratingly unresponsive

[iEimis]

Hi folks,

 

Hoping that someone can shed some light on this as it is becoming extremely frustrating as of late, maybe someone have come across this problem before.

Over the last few days I noticed an unexplainable slowness using Taskbar, Start menu and Native apps whilst on the desktop using Win10.

I have no idea what is causing this but I can sometimes click on say calculator and won't be able to interact with it whatsoever, I need to click like 10 times on the X button before I can even close it. I have a pretty decent specced PC with NVMe SSD etc so it's definitely not that as far as I can tell. I thought maybe it's because I changed my Power Plan from Ryzen Optimised to Balanced but this was probably a month ago and I only started noticing this slowness on the desktop literally within the last couple of days so can't imagine it's that.

 

Tried to google this but can't really find much info.

[MewMew]

Restart Explorer.exe.

[iEimis]

57 minutes ago, MewMew said:

Restart Explorer.exe.

That helped. Will it not revert back after restarting the computer though as I would have expected it to be resolved if that's the case but restarts of the PC prior to restarting the explorer did not help

[MewMew]

Try downloading and running Microsoft Fixit.

[LogicalDrm]

-> Moved to Windows

[Mark Kaine]

On 10/28/2020 at 11:58 PM, iEimis said:

That helped. Will it not revert back after restarting the computer though as I would have expected it to be resolved if that's the case but restarts of the PC prior to restarting the explorer did not help

It could be a storage problem or just a random glitch... If this happens more frequently you should investigate the cause obviously... 

 

I would also suggest to not use sleep mode or hibernate, also turning off hibernation could help. 

[Mark Kaine]

On 10/29/2020 at 12:37 AM, MewMew said:

Try downloading and running Microsoft Fixit.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/use-a-fix-it-tool-with-windows-10-cc3cb85b-91d7-7e56-8ce1-db50b4d18d0b

 

That is usually more than useless... 

[iEimis]

14 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

It could be a storage problem or just a random glitch... If this happens more frequently you should investigate the cause obviously... 

 

I would also suggest to not use sleep mode or hibernate, also turning off hibernation could help. 

I don't use sleep or hibernation mode. I don't think it is storage though, can't see any indications of something being wrong i.e. slow load times etc. It's only literally the task bar and native apps like calculator and photos, a good example today is I tried to open a photo and it didn't open, was just blank white forever until I killed it in task manager and restarted Microsoft Explorer like suggested by the person above and that fixed all the issues..... UNTIL I restart again. No idea what's going on. But in other applications and games no issues whatsoever, everything is still buttery smooth.

[GoodBytes]

To be honest, I have no idea.

My experience points to GPU driver issue, as everything you mentioned is GPU rendered (yes, I read that it works fine in games). Or, although unlikely, missing or broken chipset drivers.

 

But that is all I can say. Ensure your system is not OC, and your RAM XMP profile is select to Profile 1 in the UEFI. CSM mode disabled (should be by default). But that is all that crosses my mind.

 

While I don't like this solution, you can reinstall, this will clear up driver issue. Alternatively, if you have spare hardware, I would remove your main drive, plug that spare drive in, and clean install Windows and see if your problem is solved. The idea is to know if it is hardware related or not. Then again, you said restarting explorer.exe fixes your problem, so yea.. software issue.... hmm...

[iEimis]

Happy to report that the issue just seems to have disappeared on its own. I didn't notice it throughout the weekend (was very obvious beforehand whenever you tried to open anything, even a weather app it would just freeze). And today I installed the windows preview as well as the new NVidia driver so hopefully the issue won't be coming back.