Performance problem related to sysfader, msdtc, davcdata

From: Anton (NOSPAMantonbijl*_at_*hotmail.com)
Date: 03/12/04 

Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2004 00:42:32 -0800

Hi all

I have Windows XP Pro on a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 machine with
512 MB RAM. This machine has served me well for about 8
months now. However, the last couple of days I've had a
performance problem which seems to be related to sysfader
and either msdtc.exe or davcdata.exe. I haven't done
anything funny, the biggest change to the machine over the
last few days was a cleanup I did a couple of days ago by
uninstalling a number of unused applications (if I
remember correctly, the ones I uninstalled was the .Net
Framework, MSDE and two Adobe programs that were installed
together with Adobe Reader 6.0)

The problem is that when I try to access the Recent
Documents submenu on the Start Menu sysfader seems to
hang. I click Start and go to Recent Documents. Usually
the recent documents submenu would be displayed
immediately on mouseover, but now it just hangs.
Eventually after about 5 minutes the recent documents
submenu is displayed.

If I open task manager while waiting for recent documents
to be displayed, there are no applications running. Under
processes there are only fairly standard things running,
all of which I am familiar with and can reasonably
explain. Two of the processes are usually msdtc.exe and
davcdata.exe. When I terminate these two the recent
documents menu immediately appears and seems to operate
again normally. I can now close the menu and re-open it
without the delay. If I shut down windows while the menu
is in its 'hanging' state I get a dialog informing that
SysFader is not responding. I have to terminate it
manually and shut down then continues normally.
Interestingly if I look at the applications and processes
in the taskbar SysFader doesn't appear anywhere, yet when
I shut down it hangs?

Further info:
- CPU usage while the menu hangs = 0
- Other applications respond normally even while the menu
is hanging (but the screen in the area where the menu is,
continues to display the menu)

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Anton

Relevant Pages