Comment 1 by jteh on 2013-11-12 21:15
There is a known issue with Windows 7 Explorer where it will lag more and more over time due to a buggy UI Automation implementation. Can you confirm whether rebooting (or just killing Explorer and restarting it if you're comfortable doing that) speeds things up? On my system, soon after Explorer is started, response in Explorer is near instantaneous.

Comment 2 by DCPendleton (in reply to comment 1) on 2013-11-13 02:33
Thanks to your advice after doing a few tests it appears that it helps to change one of explorer's options, namely to launch folder windows as a separate process (folder options, view tab). If there is a way to fix NVDA to work better with default options then that will help, but at least this is a solution in the meantime. Thanks.

Comment 3 by jteh on 2013-11-13 02:38
It'd be great if you could answer the questions i asked in comment:1, just so we can be clear whether we're talking about the same problem.

Comment 4 by DCPendleton (in reply to comment 1) on 2013-11-13 03:14
Both rebooting and restarting explorer do speed things up considerably.
Replying to jteh:

There is a known issue with Windows 7 Explorer where it will lag more and more over time due to a buggy UI Automation implementation. Can you confirm whether rebooting (or just killing Explorer and restarting it if you're comfortable doing that) speeds things up? On my system, soon after Explorer is started, response in Explorer is near instantaneous.

Comment 5 by briang1 on 2013-11-13 10:10
Just to muddy the waters a little, when working on a fairly slow windows 7 machine, I speeded it up by turning off real time checking of the Microsoft security essentials. I noted that for some reason it hung when scrolling on pdf files more than most others, which made me think about the anti virus issue. Of course on a mega fast machine it may not be an issue.

@jcsteh Based on #3642 (comment), it does seem like the same issue is being discussed mutually. Thus, could you please respond to #3642 (comment) and update us about the current standing of Windows Explorer's performance on Windows 7 with NVDA?

I guess performance being better when starting windows in separate processes makes sense; that would essentially be the same as restarting Explorer for that instance. The bug that causes this behaviour only occurs after quite some amount of usage.

I haven't heard anything to suggest this issue has gone away in Windows 7. It's certainly gone in later versions of Windows. Unfortunately, this is a bug in Explorer, not NVDA, and Microsoft are very unlikely to even consider fixing it for Windows 7, since their focus is now very much on Windows 10. We don't have any way to work around this. Given this, I'm closing this as can't fix, frustrating as that is for users.