I am running XP SP1. Whenever I click on the My Computer icon, on Desktop, Windows Explorer or wherever, I get the "searching flashlight" icon and it takes a full minute for the My Computer page to appear. Any ideas?

Hi Gelnshiro. A couple of things for you to consider.


1. Is this only 'recent" behavior
2. Did I change anything at all lately, including installing any apps since this started


Things it can be
--------------------------------

*Needing more memory
*Needing routine maintenance EG: Scandisk/Defrag
*A new apps causing a conflict
*Dropping your PC when moving it...Tehe. *Just kidding* Thought I would thrown in some laughs.
*Memory going bad

I have an HP All-in-one that causes the same thing. Try turning off the power to the printer/scanner (if indeed you have one) when the flashlight is searching...your folders should come right up..

Hope this helps,,took me forever to figure it out as it only happens occasionally.

I'll add to this: I've seen similar things with other PC's, and for some of them, it turned out that there was a CD in the drive, and whenever My Computer got opened, it waited while it scanned the CD before it would display anything. If that's your issue, you will probably hear the CD spin up and make some noise when you try to open My Computer.

Thanks, DuncanIdaho and plchan. Unfortunately neither solution works! Any more ideas?

My only other thought on this is a seriously (SERIOUSLY) fragmented hard disk. Have you defragged lately?

Yes I defragment frequently

Do you have any mapped network drives?
I've had similar problems when the network I was on was slow.

Other than Microsofts solution (which didn't really help in my case) http://support.microsoft.com/default...1&PA=1&SD=HSCH Try unplugging (or turning off) all USB devices and removing all cd's and floppys then re-booting. If you still get the flashlight, then I'd say it's time to reload XP. Especially if its been over a year since the last XP install, (I'm a firm believer in the "XP half-life theory"). If after re-boot the flashlight goes away, you can start turning things back on to try and determine which device is the culprit. I'd still reload XP though, nothing like a fresh operating system.

If you do decide on re-installing the OS, I would highly recommend getting a new hard disk drive (only $50 at NewEgg for 40 GB). Make the new HDD the master and your original drive the slave. You should still back up important files on the original drive for safety before doing anything but nothing should happen to it to cause you to lose data. (It's a good idea to get the new HDD up and running before you hook up the old one as a slave so windows dosen't get confused with seeing another OS when trying to load a new one).
Load a new copy of XP onto the new HDD (C: ) along with all of your programs. Setup the original drive (D: ) as your user files drive (XP lets you specify where the "My Documents" and related folders, e-mail files, etc. are located). Now that everything is working good and fast again, you can use Norton Ghost to make a disk image of drive C: and save it to drive D: or CD/DVD. Now anytime things start acting goofy you can simply restore the c: drive back to the way it was in the beginning and it only takes about 10 minutes. This setup has saved me hours of troubleshooting time for weird problems like this one. Just remember to set the default locations of ALL of your user files to the D: drive (don't forget e-mail) because when you restore drive C: it is overwritten.

Another option and what I did is I bought a 120 GB hard drive, partitioned it (40GB for drive C: and the balance for D: ) and I use my old 80 GB HDD for drive E: as a backup drive for the Norton Ghost files for both the C: and D: drives.

Anyway, thats it for my thoughts. Good Luck

Paul

I believe this is the MS Knowledge Base article you need:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=321186