Why does Programs and Features take minutes to populate?

On my Windows 7 machine, the Programs and Features control panel page takes 3 and a half minutes to fully populate (it varies, but that is one example).

Initially the large majority of installed apps are shown, and then over the remaining period, further apps trickle in, while the progress bar creeps to the end. During this process, column sorting doesn't work.

Has anyone else got this problem? Is there a known fix?

Turn off the Size column. If you right click the Size column and turn it off, the list will populate just about instantly. For full speed, show only the Name, Publisher, Installed On and Version columns. Once you verified it opens instantly, add back columns that you want and then you can see which columns are the slow ones.

This has been a problem since the XP days. Part of what it is doing is calculating disk space to fill in the 'Size' column.

If you are willing to try an alternative program, there are a bunch that will allow you to quickly view installed programs (without calculating size) and then run the uninstaller:

• CCleaner has this feature: http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner
• Myuninstaller http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/myuninst.html

AntiVirus can cause this issue. Eg with McAfee, the on-access scanning intercepts regsitry reads, when compiling the list of installed software. Even with the size column disabled on my machine it took a couple of minutes to populate the list. With McAfee on access scanning disabled, it took a couple of seconds.