Classic Shell: Forum

Very frequently on booting up \Windows 8.1, Classic shell delays startup with the message" Please wait for the Start menu to finish initial collection of information."

The initial collection of information successfully concluded many months ago. The on going repeat performances would be better described as 'duplicated collection of information'

Even better, would be for the repeat performances not to occur at all, especially when for the most part I have made no explicit system changes.

Is this a bug? If not, is there a way to prevent this behavior?

Cheers

Ive never seen this message, even on initial start.
Did you download it from classicshell.net or some other website? if it wasn't downloaded from here, try uninstalling because it may be an unofficial or modified version. (though Ivo likely has more insight into the matter, and will likely respond soon)

Hi thanks for reply - yes I am pretty certain I downloaded it (version 4.10) from here.

Issue has persisted through several versions, but I see the latest Beta version 4.20 changelog indicates better support for hi resolution displays - perhaps thus far my dual-monitor, high plus low resolution (2560x1600 + 1920x1080) setup is not being handled well. Will give that a try.

The start menu has to verify that the information it has cached is up to date. It has to at least see if there are any new files in the start menu folders. If those folders are on a slow drive or on the network or contain unreasonably large number of files, the process can take more time.

If you can't think of a reason why this should be slower than usual, use the "How to capture crash dumps" link at the top to get a dump while that message is being displayed.

BTW, the last time somebody was reporting slowdown in the menu, it turned out to be bad sectors and the disk driver was taking long time to process the request. You may run a disk checker to look for bad sectors.

Hi the drive in question is a local SSD drive (not a network drive), which according to HDD guardian is in good shape - no errors or bad sectors, and 82% remaining life.

The problem I think I may have have with obtaining a crash dump is that while the 'Collecting Information' message is showing, Windows does not respond to mouse clicks - and there is no crash, so no way I know of to issue commands. Just a very long delay, with a busy mouse pointer icon

Hi - I previously responded to this thread, but see my reply so far has not appeared/been approved

To recap. The issue persists with version 4.2 beta

I am booting from a local SSD drive, with no bad sectors or other errors detected.

There is no way to capture a dump as suggested during the initialization process while the message is being displayed, because the system is completely frozen while message is displayed - no response to mouse clicks or key presses. This states persists for a number of minutes just about every time I boot up. Boot times are as a result pretty awful - completely defeating the purpose of having an SSD drive.

No errors obviously relating to start up appear in windows event log

How can I convince Classic Shell that nothing has changed or otherwise prevent this constant re-initializing on restart problem?

You can uncheck the "Start automatically for this user" setting, which will disable the start menu on reboot. This will allow you to start it manually by launching ClassicStartMenu.exe and capture dumps.

Sorry for the late reply. I have disabled the moderation for the forum however users that have registered before that still require moderation.

The information is cached to this location on your drive: %localappdata%\ClassicShell. Make sure this folder has write access, that the DataCache.db file is not read-only and that the folder's permissions are alright. You could also try deleting the '%localappdata%\ClassicShell' folder and create a new one again (in case permissions are messed up preventing the Start Menu from correctly saving that data).

_________________
Links to some general topics:

● Compare Start Menus

● Read the Search box usage guide.

I am a Windows enthusiast and helped a little with Classic Shell's testing and usability/UX feedback.

i am getting this annoying 15-20 seconds message after upgrading today to latest classic menu version
before upgrade it was working ok. don't know what version i've had before, but it was installed on 23rd april 2015 and was downloaded from this site as the latest version of that day.

update: it seems to happen only during the first minute or so after login, when windows does lots of stuff so there is high disk/cpu demand. if i let it settle then it opens right away without the message. so it seems there is high demand on disk/cpu after login to which classic start menu is fighting for along with other processes. this happens even on ssd.

could i suggest then to initialize itself with high i/o and cpu priority then after few minutes readjust priority to normal?

Does it happen every time you log in?
Background tasks like this should not raise their priority. It is not nice. What if every process decides to do that?

@gigel, using Task Manager you could calculate which of your apps loading at startup are causing maximum startup impact: http://winaero.com/blog/how-the-windows ... t-of-apps/ Maybe you will discover some other app too which might be affecting startup performance?

_________________
Links to some general topics:

● Compare Start Menus

● Read the Search box usage guide.

I am a Windows enthusiast and helped a little with Classic Shell's testing and usability/UX feedback.