First Vista repair
- November 12th, 2006
- Posted in Fixes . Vista
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I fixed my first Vista problem last week. My boss brought in his Vista RC1 machine and it was acting oddly. Explorer.exe would take 50% CPU usage (two core CPU) and the Start Menu's pin list wouldn't show up at all. Everything else was working properly (including the All Programs list, and other functions of the Start Menu).
I had to find out whether the pin list problem was the cause or the effect, so I began searching the internet for the location of the pin list. It's nearly impossible to find this information.
After a half hour of digging around with Sysinternals Filemon and Regmon, I wasn't getting anywhere. I used Sysinternals strings.exe on shell32.dll (which I had previously discovered is where the pin list calls & code are stored) and finally found out where the pin list is stored: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\StartPage
The value Favorites contains the pin list itself. I found that on this Vista machine, there was nothing wrong with the Favorites value. It was the ProgramsCache value that had become corrupted. After deleting the key and restarting Explorer, the pin list came back up and all of the CPU usage went away. Problem solved. (This all works the same in Windows XP.)
"StartPage" – the reason why it's named this is because this feature of Windows is one of the only features that made it out of the whole Windows 2000 Home debacle, known as Neptune. Basically, the wide Windows-XP start Panel is from something called "Activity Centers", which were a big part of the desktop in Neptune (And is even more relevant now with Vista's Welcome center, and the Help & Support features of Windows ME/XP/Vista). Microsoft ended up canceling Neptune, and moved on with Whistler (Windows XP). What was carried over from that cancelled project is the StartPage/StartPanel. Instead of having recently run applications on the desktop, Microsoft moved all that was Neptune's new interface into Whistler's Start Menu.
It seems, though, that they didn't rename any of the registry values… Hence, 'StartPage' holds the values for the Start Menu Panel. Microsoft tends to do this quite a bit when they carry over features from previous windows versions.
For instance, Windows 95 and Windows 98's original explorer.exe contained a hidden tab in the TaskBar properties window, called "Deskbar options". If you take a look at Vista RC1/RC2/RTM's Taskbar Properties, you'll see an option in the Taskbar properties that references Taskbar Panels. These are essentially the same thing, carried over from Chicago to Longhorn. The tab design is eerily familiar, as it seems that Microsoft finally integrated this long lost feature.
For more info, see
Don't mean to hijack your website DjLizard, but wanted to let anyone else know with this problem that Computer Associates beta anti-virus corrupts your program cache as well as contributes to the 100% cpu usage, although mine was something like 85%. I had used your fix, installed the anti-virus and had the problems once again. Once removing the program as well as deleting the program cache, my computer soars. Just wanted to leave this here in case anyone else has the same problem.
Thanks again DjLizard, you were a life and wallet saver to me.
-Jon
My boss ran an AVG virus scan with user account control in Vista on, and didn't find any viruses. (I believe that means it didn't search the entire computer, but only his user account). Then he turned user account control off, and did another virus scan again and this time it found some. So we need to know what that means..if he runs it w/it turned on, it's not really finding all viruses? What is he supposed to do to be fully protected??
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Thank you!!