whats wrong?

Many thanks electro very informative will start tonight.
have nice xmas and n.yr

bob
December 2011

I know, it's a long one, but there is no simple solution, nor one step one, as you may have a collection of isues.

Remove as many toolbard as possible. You should only keep the standard ones like the address and favorite bars, and get rid of any third party bars. They are mostly useless or redundent, are often badly coded, tend to cause LOTS of problems like instability, slow response, hang ups and crashes.
Does it works beter?
Uninstall those added toolbars.

Turn OFF the indexation service. It's not realy usefull for most persons and can cause serious slowdows.

How many icons in the notification area? Each one represent some task or process. You may have to many. Right-click and terminate those you don't need.
A clean area only show the volume, your anti-virus and the network icons and maybe up to 3 others.
You may want to uninstall some of those applications as several are not realy usefull or may have outlived your needs.
DISABLE any and all so-called preloaders or quick starter. They NEVER live up to the expected/anounced benefits, and after 10 to 20 minutes, get shoved out of RAM.

You may want to check the installed programms and uninstall those you no longer use, or have forgotten about...

Open the task manager. You can use this combo: Press Shift + Ctrl + Esc.
Keep it visible.

Sellect the performance tab. In the menu, chose Display/Display core time.
A RED line is now visible. Idealy, it should be close to the bottom of the graph. How high does it goes when you experiment those delays?
Look at the bottom graph (virtual memory use). How high is the yellow line? To high means heavy page file use. It greatly slowdown the system. It's often a symptom of to many background tasks and minimized programms. Close programms instead of minimizing them. Terminate some task from the notification area: They take up some memory and page file space.

Back on the process tab.
When you have those delays, any process % goes up? Take a peek on the performance tab, any spike of the core time?
If the red line goes up, it often means that there are a LOT of disk access and other IO trafic, and the CPU need to wait for those. That time is NEVER shown on the process list: 100% for the process is 100% real CPU time MINUS core process time , or the space between the red line and the top of the graph.

You may have to much useless and old, leftover, temporary files laying around. Clear as much as you can. CCleaner does a realy good cleanup job. FREE for personal use.

Install a good anti-virus like AVG or Avast. Both among the best and available for FREE :) Let it update and do a full scan. Let it repair any found problem.

You may be strugling with high fragmentation. After having cleaned useless files and regained drive space, you need to defragment your disk.
I propose Defraggler as it's much more effecient than the included speeddisk.

You may benefit from installing more RAM up to the maximum supported by the motherboard.

Electro
December 2011