bizzare behavior - slow Windows Explorer suddenly fixed

I had a hard drive crash a couple of weeks ago. I installed a new HD,
reinstalled my programs, was able to save data and I applied all of the
Service Packs to my installation.

In the last couple of days, Windows Explorer began slowing down. Last night
it got really slow and took 5 to 6 seconds to switch folders even if the
folders were in the "details" view and not showing icons or even if they
were empty. I checked lots of tweak websites and took some of their
suggestions. I turned off the indexing that Windows Explorer does to speed
up searches and I uninstalled SP-2. Neither one helped.

I have two disk drives so I tested Win Expl on each and it was equally slow.
My new drive is 160gb with 60gb free so free space was not an issue. It has
an 8mb cache and spins at 7200 rpm so the disk drive performance should not
be an issue. I defragged the drive with PerfectDisk as well. Still no
improvement. The really wierd thing is what happened after I tried these
fixes that did not help.

I read on one site that "Agent Ransack" was a good freeware search tool to
replace the WinXp search tool . Well, I liked the Windows 2000 search tool
but hate the one in XP so I downloaded it and added a shortcut to my quick
launch menu for it as well. Since I did not like the icon that came with
Agent Ransack, I changed the icon. I also looked at my Start|All Programs
menu and noticed that since I recently installed several programs, they were
at the back of the list and not in alphabetical order. So I dragged them
into alphabetical order.

That's all I can recall doing - downloading a freebie program, changing its
icon, and rearranging my start menu. Suddenly Windows Explorer is working
fast!?!? The operations that were taking 5 seconds on empty folders and 12
seconds on folders with lots of pictures inside just a few minutes before
were now taking at best 1/2 of a second.

So, while I should be content with an "alls well that ends well" attitude, I
am reeling with the realization that my computer went from a royal pain to a
beautiful performing machine with no action that I took looking like it
could affect it. Is it possible that when you rearrange the start menu some
hidden file is overwritten and that could be the answer? It seems strange,
but all of this seems strange. Is there some other answer that anyone can
come up with, has anybody else experience this?

Thanks for any thoughts on this.

p.s. another question, should I reinstall SP-2?


.

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