Post date: Oct 5, 2015 10:15:17 PM
Recently, I noticed a severe slowing down of the windows exlorer (WIN 7 Home Premium SP1). This had been an issue for a while, but now it sort of got out of hand and basically rendered my system dysfunctional. In trying to solve the problem, I came across a couple of useful programs. Especially helpful was the Superuser website, although it did not have the solution to my specific problem. The following software (all free!) were great tools:
- RKill, which can assist in helping to terminate malware processes, so that Malware removal tools such as Malwarebytes can detect and remove them. This in fact revealed some infections that Malwarebytes had missed before, but unfortunately did not solve my problem.
- Autoruns, which allows you to quickly identify and deactivate potentially corrupted autorun processes
- ProcessExplorer, which allows to identify processes that eat away your CPU (essentially a fancy version of the task manager)
Last but not least: the actual solution to my problem:
- I noticed that the problems with Windows explorer only emerged when Word was running (virtually always, which is why it took me so long to discover this).
- Then, I found some references online that suggested that Endnote may be the culprit. So I uninstalled Endnote (X). Problem persisted.
- Then, I disabled the Endnote Add-Ins (among which CWYW) through the Word Options: PROBLEM SOLVED!!
Will now upgrade to a more recent version of Endnote, re-install the add-ins and see if the problem comes back.