Chakolate wrote:

Martin 53N 1W <ml_news@ddnospamddml1dd.co.uk.dd> wrote in news:_ATTe.4623

You can have Windows slow to a crawl for various things, all unrelated to running s@h. Its just that s@h happens to be innocently running at the time.

Of course.  But it slows to a crawl while s@h is running, and when I shut it down, the system immediately goes back to normal.  It has done this several times, and only s@h has this effect. 

Mmmm... f/fgeorge likely knows this one better:

On some versions of Windows, there are certain critical tasks that have the same low priority as s@h. These then slow up everything until the competing task (s@h in this case) is paused.

From distant memory... I think they were to do with MS Office and/or File Explorer, or the menus. Sorry, too long back to remember the exact parts of Windows at fault.

Aside: It's always a good idea to disable file "find fast" indexing!

Good luck,
Martin