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A theory as to why IE and explorer windows load sl...oo..w...ly...

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I've been suffering silently with this problem for a long time. It happens on all of my machines. Granted, they're all configured almost essentially the same. IE is my default browser. When I type a URL into the addressbar (which I have on my taskbar), my system sometimes takes an awfully long time to open the browser window and load the page.

Sometimes this also happens to my explorer windows - they freeze up. I can always kill the process and restart it, but it's just odd. It hasn't plagued me enough to do much about it, but a few weeks ago, I tried to narrow down the problem by uninstalling all IE addins such as the google toolbar, but the problem still repro'd. So I gave up.

Today, a coworker suggested something after watching my system churn when opening a URL... “That looks like a GDI leak.” So I fired up the task manager, added the “GDI Objects” volumn (View | Set Columns), and noticed that wisptis.exe had thousand of objects, which probably ain't right. I killed it, and my system seems snappier... but it's hard to tell since it isn't very consistent to begin with.

I googled wisptis to find out what it is, and got to this page, which does mention the possibility of a GDI leak. So I'm going to try this for a while and see if it helps.

By the way, it strikes me as incredibly stupid to have this tablet-specific code running at all times when it's not necessarily on a tablet machine; I hope they had a good reason for that. (It's not really clear to me who “they” is in this case - Adobe? Microsoft?)

[Update 7/9: Thanks to Larry for pointing it out, there's a fix to get wisptis.exe off your system, if you don't need it. Read the comments on this post.]

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 21, 2004
    Interesting on the GDI thing - I just checked, and SharpReader, my RSS thinggie of choice, is using around 2500 GDI objects! Ouch! Nearest after that is Explorer and Outlook2003, on around 200.

    Wow. Another reason not to keep SharpReader open all the time....
  • Anonymous
    June 21, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    June 21, 2004
    I never noticed your problem, but with a normal XP install (plus Office 2003), Wisptis was not present for me -- until I installed Acrobat Reader -- and then it appeared when I ran Acrobat Reader, and stayed loaded until rebooted (unless I killed it).

    It looks like the reg mod on the site you linked handles it for good, but I didn't see it at the time I was trying to accomplish that.

    I was also trying to find a way to speedup Acrobat Reader's load time, short of buying a Pentium 7, and it turned out that this little Adobe Speedup utility does that wonderfully -- and also has an option to banish Wisptis.

    http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/1069854583/1

    On another subject, if you have any thoughts on the last comment here, I'm all ears:

    http://blogs.msdn.com/kclemson/archive/2003/10/20/53841.aspx
  • Anonymous
    June 22, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    June 22, 2004
    Yeah, it was using over 6,000 GDI objects on mine. I found a short script that completely unregisters wisptis: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1260&page=2

    -Robert
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  • Anonymous
    June 22, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    June 22, 2004
    Sig, it almost sounds like you're back in the Win98 days when we had to worry about "resources," which this is unfortunately a descendent of, I think.

    While I don't use IE anymore, I do use MyIE2, which runs on the IE engine. I typically have 20-40 tabs open in it (I know, I know), and the GDI figure, which I never monitored before yesterday, seems to be in the 2000-3000 range or so, which may be good or bad, I'm not sure which. I don't see stalls though, so I guess I'm OK.
  • Anonymous
    June 22, 2004
    I've always found that when my machine is running slow, Adobe is running somewhere in the background.
  • Anonymous
    July 09, 2004
    KC, just found the "real" fix, which is pointed out in the boredguru post. Basically you go to the regional settings in the control panel,on the Languages tab, hit "Details".

    In the installed services will be something about advanced UI options, remove that. It'll pull ink off the machine.

    To add it back, it's available on a checkbox under the add button.
  • Anonymous
    July 09, 2004
    Fantastic!! Thanks so much.
  • Anonymous
    July 16, 2004
    It turns out that even if you do that it still sometimes comes back :( I don't know why but...

    My current thing to try is to:

    wisptis /unregserver

    which removes the WISPTIS registry fields. So it's no longer registered as a COM server which should be enough to make it go away.
  • Anonymous
    July 19, 2004
    Kevin Dente's registry fix solved my IE resource issues:

    http://weblogs.asp.net/kdente/archive/2004/06/04/148145.aspx