In the past few months, one of my laptops running with windows XP responded very slowly to both double-click and right-click. Double-click to open a photo less than 1 KB takes more than a minute while the right-click sometimes might freeze the Windows Explorer. Everything works fine if I use the program to open it. This problem is not specific to any type of files.
Unlike others, this laptop didn't install many applications. It doesn't even have Microsoft Office on it. But it carries adobe reader, Nero burning software, AVG anti-virus, Spybot Seach & Destroy, and the default graphic card software by Intel. That's. It was used to be super fast.
Using ShellExView for diagnostics and disabling every single Context Menu Handler, Icon Handler and Property Sheet don't help. Finally the System File Checker (sfc) command fixed the problem.
sfc /scannow
Be sure to have your Windows installation CD ready before you issue the above command.
Now I enabled all the extensions that were disabled via ShellExView. Everything is back to normal now.
In this article, it mentions Context Menu handler for Intel® Graphics could be the possible culprit. But it isn't in my case. The problem I had was not only right-click but also double-click. Thus, if you have the similar trouble, you may have to trial-and-error to rule out the issue. Using ShellExView to find the root cause is extremely time-consuming because every change you make require a reboot in order to see the actual effect. Luckily I finally have my problem solved.