Hi all.

For the past few months, any files over 100 mb just take forever to delete (20 seconds to 7 minutes for a 700mb file). Resources and cpu are at 100% and there is nothing I can do to unfreeze until the deletion is complete.

In safe mode this does not happen. So, obviously a driver or something I installed a while back is causing this. I have all sorts of process viewing programs and cannot find the culprit. Short of a fresh install of XP, any ideas or a delete.exe replacement out there?

Tks,

Sounds like you don't have much contiguous space and the larger files are being scattered around the disk. Have you done a defrag lately?

Are we talking about a simple delete,

or a delete with wipe, or Erase?

The latter can take some time in large files.

1 - Check if your HD is running in PIO mode - that will degrade performance like crazy and cause high CPU usage

- Control Panel -> System -> Hardware -> Device Manager button

- Device Manager -> IDE/ATA ATAPI Controllers

- double click primary IDE channel, Advanced Settings Tab

- Check that Transfer mode popup is set to "DMA if available"

- Check that the "Current" field sows "Ultra DMA mode 5" or some other DMA mode, and NOT PIO mode.

- repeat for secondary IDE channel, though thats the CD/DVD and not as critical.

If your HD is in PIO mode there are ways to remedy that.

2 - Defrag your drive though if that was the cause it would happen in safe mode too

As for drivers - any resident AV or desktop search software could cause this, disable all AV and desktop search things. Just a wild guess.