The strangest thing happened...

[TreasonousBastard]

Yesterday I downloaded a Pacman game from Yahoo, and about the same time Microsoft sent me a security update.

The game didn't work, so I used Revo to uninstall it. Immediately, my ancient XP machine slowed down and Opera came to a dead halt.

Restored to before the update, and the machine worked better but Opera was still a slug.

Coincidentally came across a CNet post about Office slowing down after a Revo uninstall of something else, and it looks like a clean reinstall of Opera might work. While backing up bookmarks, history, and all that stuff, I found almost 200,000 empty temp files buried in a couple of Application Data folders!

I have no idea how they got there, and whether it was Windows, Opera, Revo, Pacman, or something else that put them there, but everything works great after I deleted them all.

A mystery solved. Halfway, anyway.

[hobbit709]

1. I've never had a problem with Revo

But I've run into more than enough problems with Windows update screwing up with something else at the same time. The main reason I set Automatic update to "Notify me but don't download" Out of 200 patches, fixes, etc. on XP, I use 6 of them and have no problems on my machines.

As far as Temp files go, windows thinks Temp files are actually permanent. It never wants to get rid of anything. I had one machine someone brought in that had 6Gb worth of "Temp" files dating back to 2004 It also had aboput 3 Gb in "Temporary Internet" files. Once I cleaned out the junk and tweaked it a little it went from 5 minutes to under a minute to boot.

[TreasonousBastard]

2. I never had a problem with Revo either, but...

just happened to come across a post mentioning it as a possibility.

Most likely it was two things trying to install at the same time and playing with the same DLL or registy entry. but I'll never know. I wonder how it found Opera's "settings" and two other folders, though. Once before everything slowed down when when something found Opera's history and added 65,000 entries.

Opera? 64k both times? There's a hint, for whatever it's worth.