Slow Run dialog

Over the last few months I've been getting better at using hotkeys for navigating around. One of my most used ones is Windows+R, which brings up the Run dialog.

But every once in a while it's dead slow. So slow I begin to think "did I really press those buttons?" and I press them again. And again. After 10-11 seconds I get four or five Run dialogs up at once. The problem comes and goes. Some evenings it happens all the time, but then it can take days or weeks before I see the problem again.

Today it came back, and I decided I wanted to find out what causes it. I'm having a presentation in a few weeks and don't want to have it popping up during the live demos.

I started up Procmon and began to capture events as I pressed Win+R. After a lot of filtering I found a line with the result set to "BAD NETWORK PATH". Hmm. Sounds suspicious. The path it was trying to open was \\server\employees\frode, which is the domaincontroller at work.

Ok, that sounds reasonable enough. For some reason it's trying to contact the domaincontroller whenever I open the Run dialog. My first thought is that the historylist contains a reference to that server, but after reviewing the list I could not find anything particular. I removed the history list completely by renaming the registrykey HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\RunMRU. The historylist is now empty, but still it would take about 10 seconds to open the dialog.

I recognized the path it was trying to open as my %HOMESHARE% path. Opened up cmd.exe, and ran the Set command. Amongst the variables I saw the following three:

HOMEDRIVE=Z:
HOMEPATH=\
HOMESHARE=\\server\employees\frodel

Hm, Z: is a mapped drive to the server at work. When I left work today I put my laptop in Hibernate mode by just closing the lid, and it's just been awaken again here at home. So that means that Z: is still my homedrive, but that is not an accessible drive from home. Z:\ is still a mapped drive, but not a functional one.

In cmd.exe i tried the following, and received an errormessage 10 seconds later:

C:\>%HOMEDRIVE%
The network path was not found.

I think we're getting somewhere!

Rebooted the computer, and this time the environment variables were set like this:

HOMEDRIVE=C:
HOMEPATH=\Users\frodel

The Run dialog is now 100% responsive, and I'm pretty sure it was because %HOMEDRIVE% and %HOMESHARE% was referring to the server which wasn't available.