Windows 10: Desktop icons not responding on first click, opening other icons

I'm beginning to think this may be a permissions issue or a corrupt user profile, but that's just a guess. I know the tool you mean - it is very cautious if you follow all the preliminary steps.

Did you simply run it with all repairs selected?

Can I check what you did... in Safe Mode, what I meant was - if you launch explorer, and browse to your desktop folder, can you see the shortcuts etc you expect to be present on your desktop? Can you confirm that's what you did?

Another thing to try is to create a new user for test purposes. Check the desktop and shortcuts there.
If things are ok in one user but not another, you have a corrupted user profile.

 

I just did a user profile fix (not in Safe Mode). Icons I tried are currently opening on one click in anywhere from 4-5 secs to 90, which obviously isn't normal. Double clicks open immediately typically.
Tweaking.com - I thought I had, but didn't do the first power kill step. In any case, when it was done it had reset dozens of file type associations. Took a good hour to fix and still don't know if I got them all.

Here's part of the Desktop folder in Safe Mode/Windows Explorer:

 

Ok, so you can see the icons in explorer, but they are not displayed on the desktop. And I understand you to say these respond quickly.

So try creating a new user profile - of course you won't see the same set of icons etc but if you've installed some things as All users with desktop icons you may see those.

You can also examine the permissions of shortcuts as viewed in your screenshot: example from mine:

 

I set up a second account (local) and most of the program icons are on it. Of the several I tried, they all responded just as slowly as on my main (administrator) account.

 

That was in normal mode presumably.

Can you post a screenshot of your task manager in normal mode when your PC is nominally idle?
Also, try to do the same during the time when waiting for the PC to respond to clicking a shortcut. For that you will need to have the task manager open, click the shortcut, and PrtSc or similar the whole screen.

Also download and run Crystal DiskMark, and run that on each drive.

In safe mode, try this:
Right click on your desktop
Click VIEW
Then select SHOW DESKTOP ITEMS

Your last comparatively easy option is to investigate clean boot configurations, and try to get the same responsiveness you have in Safe Mode from the shortcuts you viewed in explorer by disabling startups and services.

I.e. by a process of elimination try to find an installed program that is causing the delay.

However, it would remain a puzzle as to why your shortcuts are not appearing on your safe mode desktop.

You might get some ideas by searching generally and in this forum for (e.g.)
shortcuts slow to respond
slow response when clicking shortcuts
etc

What I fear is that all this effort will just point to the inevitable conclusion: you have a corrupted user profile.. but worse, you can't create a good user profile.
"The owner only had two users (with Admin priv) and a guest account. And the User account was corrupted. What made it so hard to find was that this corruption didn't really affect anything other than the time it took to open windows specific shortcut files on the desktop. There was no crashing or other anomalies."
Resolved - Very slow access to various Windows Desktop shortcuts | WindowsBBS
(Very old thread, similar symptoms, different edition of Windows)

 

Thanks for the suggestions and those links. Right now, I've got Trend Micro's House Call running, 883 minutes going (66%), in preparation for trying Tweaking.com again, this time the right way. To summarize, here are the two, maybe three post-1607 update symptoms that are causing problems:

1) restarts sometimes hang in the closing or start up phase, but then restart fine after the computer is powered down;
2) desktop icons respond very slowly to a single click, if at all, but typically respond quickly to a double click (setting = single); and
3) (not sure yet if this has been fixed) XYplorer file manager going not responding at a certain point and then bringing down eveything else with it (I've gone back a couple of versions to find out more, as someone else had a related problem and the developer wants to see if we can isolate it).

 

I have xyplorer 15.9 on mine- although I rarely use it, no problems noted.

If it's not user profile corruption (as reported elsewhere) that's affecting your desktop icons - which might be borne out in that you found the same with a second user, then clean boot and shellexview might seem the way to go. Unfortunate you've no shortcuts on the desktop in safe mode, another puzzle.

Very puzzling this mix of symptoms.

I'm wondering if there's some graphic driver issue... sometimes odd GUI issues are found to be that.

And do you have any odd manufacturer's utility programs installed?

 

Ran Tweaking.com's Windows repair program again the right way, but no improvement (plus, even unchecking file associations it still changed a bunch and left me with some reset permissions that have to be changed).

Here's the Task Mgr screenshot in idle you requested and it shows something very not normal I hadn't realized is going on: Windows Explorer (explorer.exe) is running hot. Normally (last I paid attention was with 1511), it idles at 1-2%. I took that shot about two minutes after start up, with no Apps running but Task Mgr (apps show up top). As I write, it's nearing 15 minutes and it's still running the same way. Perhaps that's the clue we've been looking for to understand what's going on with the icons and why XYplorer sometimes goes not responding. I've added a System Explorer screenshot (~2350 handles). I also just turned off and disabled Windows Search, which I didn't realize had been reenabled, but that's not changing anything with explorer. I did run ESET and Trend Micro's scanners and they came up with nothing except a couple false positive PUPs.

 

Mm, if consistent, that's odd.

1. Please also try to get a screenshot like that just after you've clicked a desktop shortcut as I described previously - I don't know if that will tell us more, but it's (relatively) easy to do although you may have to try a couple of times because of timing.

2. Download and run Sysinternals Procmon (free). This captures all activity, and can filter (technically complex) the result.
Here I'm hoping that since explorer is the dominant process, that capture will give some idea what its doing.
Post a screenshot of anything interesting in what's captured.

You can try that in both idle and after clicking a shortcut.
In the latter case note the exact time you click the shortcut, so you know where to start looking in the captured result.

Note: the capture is LONG, so spend a while looking through. It may or may not help.

3. Now it's time to check at a basic level.
For reference, boot to safe mode, and check near 0 CPU use.

4. Now use msconfig (which you can set up in Safe Mode) to do a clean boot.
Clean Boot - Perform in Windows 10 to Troubleshoot Software Conflicts
(1st part)

Please post a screenshot of the task man.

Please use the numbers above in your reply to make it easier to follow - thanks.

Note: you can organise the display- put highest CPU use at top by clicking the CPU tab.

 

I did have a screenshot after clicking on Any Video Converter and it was exactly the same as what you see. To check if that was causing it, I rebooted, and clearly it's not the click but something else. Don't know if you saw my edits, but I added System Explorer screenshot, turned off and disabled Windows Search and mentioned having run ESET and Trend Micro's scanners in the last 48 hours.

 

In ProcMon, what am I looking for? For example, there are a ton of Buffer Overflows but I don't know if that's important, since they are not under explorer.exe. With Explorer.exe, there are Successes, Name Not Found, a Cancel here or there and some File Locked With. Don't know what to make of any of that.

 

Procmon.. it depends if anything stands out. If not, move on to the other steps. Obviously the information is there, accessing it is another matter, unfortunately.

I understand you to have noticed there's no change in explorer CPU use before and after clicking a shortcut, so we're down to why that CPU use is occurring.

A clean boot and comparison with Safe mode allows the possibility of a process of elimination of cause- assuming you can reach a point where explorer is NOT using so much CPU time.

 

Safe Mode = no problem with explorer.exe, very low cpu (still no desktop icons)

Will try to get to clean boot over the weekend.

User 2 (account you suggested I set up for test):
- first click is responding on desktop icons (contrary to what I saw the other day)
- explorer.exe (14.8%, 17.3%) and mailwasher (15.2%) running high cpu (screenshot)

 

Really strange thing happened. I just went into Safe Mode to see if right clicking on the desktop and checking View Icons would free things up, but found I didn't have to. They were all there lined up in nice rows. Where did that come from?? And single click worked instantly on all! Then I checked Task Manager for explorer.exe and guess what... (in the screenshot there were actually two Windows Explorer entries, both running low). So here's your Safe Mode shot in idle. Not sure what to make of it all. Unfortunately, it didn't change the normal mode response.

 

Ok, so proceed to clean boot. That Safe Mode (magically?) works suggests you have a chance of finding the culprit by elimination.