I am experiencing what might be this same issue. When running Display Fusion my windows explorer becomes extremely slow to respond, usually taking 10 seconds or more just to navigate between folders or double click a folder to open on my local drive or navigate through start menu items. Exiting Display Fusion immediately corrects the problem. A machine restart seems to help the performance problem temporarily for a short time, but it always comes back. I have tried the most current beta version as well as the most current release version of Display Fusion, both cause the same performance issue.
I have a very powerful workstation: 32G RAM, 2 dual-core CPUs, etc. and I am running Windows 2008 R2 in 'user experience' configuration, so I doubt that the hardware or OS is the problem.
I am a professional software engineer so I know my way around. I would be happy to work with your support & developer staff to help narrow in on the issue. I like the DF product, but as it is now I cannot use it on my workstation because of this performance issue.

Mark Mazzitello
email mark.mazzitello@occamgroup.com

Hi Keith.

- I attached the Troubleshooting log.
- The CPU spike happens any time windows explorer is open and doing something, such as opening a file or another folder. When I am just drilling into folders on my local drives, the explorer.exe process in Task Manager jumps from less than 1% up to 25-50% for about 10-15 seconds each time a window is opened or a file or folder is double clicked. After the file or folder opens then the processor usage drops back down to <1%. When I was saving the txt file in notepad, the notepad.exe process spiked at 30% CPU usage when I clicked 'file -> save as' and notepad was waiting unresponsive for 20 seconds for windows explorer to open a save location window. Restarting the PC will temporarily make the windows explorer latency and delays shorter for a short time, like maybe an hour or less, but it always creeps back up to the 15 sedond delay to do any navigation or opening of files (with the associated CPU spike) and it is never as responsive as when DF is not running.
- Disabling the Application Hooks did not make any difference in the bahavior, even after restarting Display Fusion and restarting the PC.

All of the above issues do not occur or are corrected instantly as soon as Display Fusion is exited, and start up again as soon as Display Fusion is launched.

I hope this helps.

Mark

No such luck - Disabling the Application Hooks and restarting Display Fusion and did not make any difference in the windows explorer latency bahavior, even after completely restarting the PC.

Interesting... I disabled the Title Bar Buttons and restarted Display Fusion, but the buttons still show on the window title bars even with Display Fusion exited (from system tray icon, right click and 'exit'). Even on new windows & newly launched apps.

Disabling both of these things (Title Bar buttons and Multimonitor Taskbar) and restarting DF did not have much effect if any on the windows explorer latency issue. Maybe the folder opening delay went down from 15 to 10 seconds. I cannot restart my PC again for a while (I need to get some work done) but I can try that later on and see if that helps temporarily or permanetly.

I rebooted my workstation again since disabling the TitleBar buttons and Application Hooks. Windows explorer is now as fast responding as it should be, but again it always is immediately after a reboot. I am going to let it stay logged in over the weekend and see how it is on Monday morning.

Also even though the Title Bar buttons are disabled, they still show on all windows. See attached screen shot. Is this how it is supposed to be? They even show an all windows when Display Fusion is not running.

UPDATE: Monday morning after having left the workstation logged in all weekend, the windows explorer slowness is present but not nearly as bad as it was before disabling Title Bar buttons and Application Hooks on Friday (delay & processor spike is now 2-3 seconds instead of 10-15). The Title Bar buttons are still appearing even though this feature is disabled.

OK!, AppHooks are disabled (I will miss them! But that's ok for now.) CPU usage creeps up over time, it hasn't done it since the two posts in the last thread. I will rport back after it's had time to run w/ apphooks off for the weekend.

Disabling nView did get rid of the Title Bar buttons and als seems to have addressed the performance problem - although I do still have DisplayFusion Tiele Bar buttons and Application Hooks disabled.
Would a logical next step be to re-enable Title Bar Buttons and/or Application Hooks and see what happens with the performance issues?

So far so good. I re-enabled Application Hooks and Title Bar buttons since disabling NVidia n-view a couple hours ago, and the windows explorer performance problems seem to be fixed. I'll let the PC run for a while logged in and see what happens, but I am optimistic that you nailed down the source of the problem.
I'll post an update to this thread if any further issues are encountered.
Thanks!

Ok after testing out the new beta 12 for a couple of days, I noticed the issue comes back again. I tried removing some elements from the taskbar (Start & Show Desktop) but needless to say that hasn't helped. However, I have one new thing to report: it seems this issue appears when I resume my computer directly from sleep mode (not the first time, but after multiple times, a few days later).

I don't run n-view so what Mark is facing might not be related to the same issue.

I will try running DF with application hooks disabled now.

@Kieth, 6 Days with hooks disabled and so far, DF has been playing nicely.

My performance issues have completely disappeared since I disabled "n-View" (which is an application option that installs by default with the nVidia Quadro video card driver). I have had Display Fusion running for several days with application hooks and title bar buttons enabled and I have no more performance issues.
Thanks,
Mark

@Kieth Upgraded, changes made. Will let you know when it all decides to go to hell in a hand-basket.

Incidentily, the new logo, I like it. But it looks like it could be the bastard child of the Fedora Linux logo and Trillian (IM Client.)

With a week using DF with hooks disabled, I have not seen the issue show itself again. I will follow your steps and bring back a debug log when the issue arises.

1 week down, no issues.

@Kieth, correct. B14 and App Hooks are enabled

I too have not yet experienced any issues since Beta 14 with Hooks enabled. However, I will continue to monitor it and let you know if the issue arises again.