I recently discovered Dopus, and liked it enough to put it on my two computers. It is a godsend on my vista machine and works perfectly there, but on my XP sp2 machine (2.2ghz 4 gigs ram) It takes about 15 seconds after I right click on either a file or a directory for the context menu to come up. This doesn't happen in Explorer where it comes up immediately. For me this delay is unacceptable since i use the context menus often in Explorer.
I read the faq's and tried a few items like hiding the windows items on the context menu. No help.
I dl'd Shellmenuview and disabled everything there with no success.
Any ideas? I'm a newbie with Dopus on the 60 day eval and would like to solve this problem.
Try running Process Monitor to see what dopus.exe is up to when you right-click a file. Maybe something will jump out.
Also check that the problem still happens with a simple new (empty) text file in somewhere like your My Documents folder (but not the Desktop). If that works fine then we might be able to work out what's triggering the problem, but if even that doesn't work and you've disabled windows context menu items then it's got to be something fairly generic going on...
Unfortunately running procmon freezes up my machine, (a rare occurance on XP pro). However, I regularly use taskinfo and right clicking an empty text file in both explorer and Dopus produced identical results in taskinfo (processes). But in explorer the context menu opened instantly while in Dopus I got the hourglass and the usual 15 or so second delay.
If 3rd party/windows items are turned off then pretty much all Opus is doing is going through some registry values to build the context menu. That shouldn't normally be slow unless there's something odd going on (which may or may not be the same thing breaking Process Monitor, who knows).
Stuff I would try:
Make sure you have no network drives mapped which point to unreachable computers. Having those can slow down a lot of things even if they don't seem to reference the drives directly. (e.g. I've see it lock up my taskbar in the past.)
Try temporarily disabling anti-virus or firewall software in case there's some kind of conflict. (If there is then we can try and work out why.)
Process Monitor making the whole PC lock up does suggest something is wrong though. It's a very common/standard tool so it seems pretty strange for it to be conflicting with something.
I have disconnected network drives. I have eight computers on my network and not all are always on. But this causes no problem with explorer or Total Commander. Dopus should be able to generate a timely context menu on a machine with disconnected network drives. It does on the 64 bit version running perfectly on my Vista Laptop which resides on the same network. I feel that Vista's Explorer really needs a replacement, so I may get the program for it alone. I was hoping to use it on my XP too but with this problem I wouldn't substitute it for explorer.
Did disconnecting the drives solve the problem? If not then it's not something to worry about.
Having unreachable network drives doesn't always cause a problem, but it can so it's worth checking. It doesn't just cause problems with Opus, either. If there is a network drive which Windows thinks is connected but is actually unreachable then you can get all kinds of random pauses in various apps, in my experience at least.
The disconnected network drives thing isn't really Opus, AFAIK, it's Windows. You could say that Windows should not delay API calls for such a long time if a program does something that inadvertently has to wait on a network drive, but I doubt Microsoft will listen. (Or maybe it is something MS have improved since it isn't happening on your Vista machine. Opus doesn't do anything different between Vista and XP in this regard so, if it actually is to do with network drives, it'll probably be the OS that is different and thus the OS that was at fault).
I can't think why Opus would be trying to connect to a network drive when right-clicking some files in another place so I don't think it's something Opus is explicitly triggering, either.
As I say, I've seen the Task Bar go unresponsive for 30 seconds or more, or File Open dialogs do the same, when I've had network drives in that state and when neither the Task Bar nor the File Open dialog have been pointing at anything on those drives.
[quote="joste1"]The slow context menus are Dopus specific.
Not a worry if I don't use the program :)[/quote]
That sort of matches my experience. Anything from 5 to 30 seconds to get most context menus.
"Folder" menus can be especially slow.
I put it down to having changed the context menu somehow in a way that forces it to work too hard to figure out what to do.
I just haven't found the time to run around disabling entries in an attempt to restore sanity.
I am surprised that it has hit someone with a new installation.
Thanks for the post. I have discovered the source of the problem. It was in the 'send to' contextual menu command. There was a shortcut in it for an old text editor that I had lost patience with and subsequently removed.
I went to 'documents and settings' clicked on the 'send to' directory and removed the shortcut to the defunct editor and presto the right click now works as it should in Dopus.
Interesting that Explorer didn't hang on this problem the way Dopus did.
In Explorer the right click context menu came up instantly, however it did hang for a few seconds when I navigated down to the 'send to' item. Dopus obviously hangs until the entire contents of the context menu is read.
Anyway I hope this helps anyone else with this problem.
Thanks for your help Leo. Interesting, that when I disabled the windows context menu items in prefs it didn't fix the problem; the 'send to' item does not appear in this condition so I guess the windows items are not disabled, bit only hidden, meanwhile Dopus was still trying to read the 'send to' items and the context menu had to wait until it finished. Go figure!
The context menu debug stuff will let you see if a particular handler is slowing things down. I don't think it reports anything about shortcuts in the Send-To sub-menu but it's easy to see if that's the problem by opening it in Explorer.
Thank you for the tip on the SendTo folder. I deleted all the contents of that folder (never use it) and now right clicks are immediate versus 10 seconds!
