I have a new pc with Win7. MoI takes 40-60 seconds to start up! No other programs are like this on this machine. Suggestions? Just reinstall MoI? Thanks. -Nick

Hi Nick, that's odd - this is the full version you're talking about, not the demo version right?

On my 7 year old machine over here it starts up in about 5 seconds...

Is it possible that your virus checker is interfering with things? MoI does use the Internet Explorer engine to display its UI and sometimes virus checker programs try to hook into the various mechanisms of that to screen everything that is happening in the engine.

Do you get any different result if you disable any anti-virus or anti-spyware systems and then launch MoI?

- Michael

Thanks Michael. MoI starts in about 5 seconds on any other pc I have used too. Not this one though... I totally removed AVG virus and MoI's still slow. Reinstalled MoI and its still slow (although it wasnt a totally clean reinstall because the ini and keys were still there). Booted in safe mode and its still slow. Tried 'Last know good setup' or whatever its called, still slow. I dont really know when this started (pc is only a month old), so it's hard to say WTH i did, or what windows did that i am not aware of. oh well, just have to leave MoI open all the time, I guess. but then again, the network license checker will kick me off the netbook when i use MoI on that too.

is there any way to log the startup or find out whats going on during the startup? the hourglass (or current spinning thing version of it) goes away after about 5 seconds and then just NOTHING until MoI pops up.

I would say video card...try dxdiag display tests and see if everything seems smooth there. Drivers?

Hi Nick, maybe try doing a reset of IE settings, under the system Control Panel > Internet Options > Advanced tab, as shown in this blog post:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/06/12/628499.aspx

Maybe that will fix up something that's gotten mangled in your system registry for the Internet Explorer infrastructure.

> is there any way to log the startup or find out
> whats going on during the startup?

Well, there is a general purpose Windows system performance analyzer thing:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/performance/cc825801.aspx
but it's not exactly easy to use.

There is also another utility that can trigger a crash dump to be generated from a running program and if you make one of those near the middle of the long startup then you could send that to me and I would be able to see what was going on at that particular instant in time. Let me know if doing the IE reset above does not help and we can give this a try.


- Michael

Hi Nick, so if that IE reset thing does not do the trick, then try this - download the ProcDump utility from here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/dd996900.aspx

Unzip that and then open up a command window and cd to that directory.

Then start up MoI, wait until approximately halfway through the long startup process and then type in the following in the command window: procdump moi

That will capture a snapshot of MoI's current program state as a crash dump file named MoI.dmp, and if you send that to me in e-mail to moi@moi3d.com I might be able to see what is going on during that long startup period.

- Michael

Sounds to me that Windows has its read caching turned off somehow or your hard drive configuration / performance is way below par??

Typically if you start an app, and close it, if you immediately restart it, it's usually way faster because parts of it are still cached in RAM, this sounds to me like something is turned off in your configs or similar.

Now if all the other programs on the machine starts okay then maybe it is IExplorer settings or something.

-Will

Sorry for the lapse.

There must be something goofy with this OS as a few other programs now randomly get slow (mostly Thunderbird when reply/fwding). I had also reset IE as you asked but that didnt fix anything. Being that I dont have much on this machine, I am just going restore the OS to the default state (Dell system restore).

Michael, I did do a dump log if you want it (as you had posted), but I won't ask you to spend time on it for my sake.

Thanks for the help. -Nick

Hi Nick, yeah it sounds like a system restore would be a good idea.

But why don't you go ahead and send me the dump anyway (e-mail to moi@moi3d.com) I would like to take a quick look at it to see if anything sticks out in it or not.

- Michael

Crashdump file was sent to you. Thanks.

Hi Nick,

> Crashdump file was sent to you. Thanks.

I don't seem to have received it, can you please try sending one more time?

- Michael

What, you didnt get it despite the fact that I sent it to the wrong address? :-0

Resent to the correct address.

-Nick

Hi Nick, I got it and I replied to you with some details in e-mail.

From the initial look it seems to be related to system fonts somehow, at the moment that you took the crash dump snapshot there were some Windows OS components trying to enumerate fonts.

Maybe there is a corrupt font or something like that which is bogging that process down.

The font enumeration is not something that MoI is doing directly, it's an internal part of mshtml.dll initialization.

- Michael

It used to be a saying that you didnt load too many fonts in your fonts folder as it would lag the system. Dont know if THATS still true, but I dont think you want to fill it with some huge bundle of 10,000 fonts from a disk...

Oh, ah, hmmm... so maybe gin & juice + 65000fonts.torrent don't mix after all.

My memory is hazy, but I see now that there are 9,197 fonts currently in the folder.

Hmmm...

Hi Nick, well that would seem to be the problem.... ;)

Pick something like your favorite 1000 of those and get rid of the rest and that should probably zip things back up again.

Otherwise I guess that you will probably see this delay at odd times in a variety of apps, in some it may be when you go to edit a text document that lets you pick different fonts in it like a word processor.

- Michael

Ok Michael. I was trying to rebuild the font library I had had previously. But, I got side tracked and then forgot to get rid of the ones I dont need. Oops! I will do that soon and give you the result.

“Here's to alcohol: the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.” - Homer Simpson

-Nick

MoI is back to normal with default fonts. Thanks for your help, Michael. I guess that problem/solution can go in your troubleshooting guide. :-)

-Nick

Hi Nick, that's great that it is back to normal, the dump analysis paid off!

Yes, I will have to add that to my troubleshooting checklist: Have you recently been drinking and handling fonts? :)

- Michael