For too long now, I've noticed lots of long pauses and unexplained performance annoyances (slowness!) on my laptop with Photoshop CS2 and Illustrator CS2 that I just couldn't figure out. Having looked at various forums and web sites, I couldn't find any obvious connection to the problems I was having. I'm not running a powerhouse laptop, but it still was too slow. For some reason, I was just inspired to do a bit of investigation rather than just accept the fact that it's slow. Opening a simple GIF file off my desktop was taking 10 seconds. Just opening it!

I downloaded two tools, not sure if either might help best explain the issue I was experiencing.

First was RegMon from SysInternals. Fired it up and followed the steps that I normally do when opening a file in Photoshop. Hit CTRL+E to stop recording, then hit the filter button () to reduce the number of entries to something more manageable:

My theory, based on no real scientific evidence, was that it had something to do with the network. The pauses never spiked the CPU, yet they completely blocked the application from continuing. So, it seemed like it was waiting for a response ... maybe for something it couldn't find. I looked through the entires, in particular for any file path references that weren't local. Nothing showed up.

Next up, FileMon from SysInternals. Same process as before.

This time however I spotted some requests I found to be more unusual:

FileMon showed that Photoshop was referring to files in this path: C:\WINDOWS\system32\spool\drivers\w32x86\3. A printer driver. Interesting. I might be on to something here. I went to that directory to double check the printer manufacturer before I took any other actions. I have an OKI Data Laser printer at home, but at the time I was doing this, I wasn't a network where the printer would have been accessible. More interesting, and maybe part of the cause is that I have configured the printer to use HTTP access. I could have taken the next step to look at the requests (and timeouts) that the printer driver was likely getting for it's requests -- but seeing them wouldn't help me fix the problem easily. The printer driver files in that directory indeed belonged to my OKI laser printer.

I went to Printers and Faxes in the control panel and deleted the printer.

In Photoshop, I redid the same test. Kazoom! The file opened immediately without any unexpected delays. I'll need to still find a work-around, as I do occasionally like to print. Maybe non-HTTP IPP access would be better?