Question Explorer/window operations lagging

[Tornik]

I started experiencing this the other day, without having made any notable change to the system or applications, or having installed any new apps. Operations such as Alt+Tab window switching, calling the Start Menu using the Windows Key, etc - in other words, Explorer actions - are lagging, sometimes taking a few seconds to complete. The issue doesn't seem to be there on fresh boot, but begins appearing, and then getting worse, over time during a session.

At first I thought this was because of media wallpapers I use through Wallpaper Engine, but disabling it didn't solve it. I ran sfc scannow and some errors were detected and fixed. I also ran the DISM test, disabled search indexing and Cortana, and checked performance traces in Task Manager - it doesn't look like there's any spikes in CPU/disk usage, and usage percentages are very low for memory, CPU, disk and GPU.

Any ideas what else could've started causing this?

Specs are in signature below. Windows version is 20H2 (build 19042.789)

 

[rgd1101]

how full are the ssd?
cpu/gpu temp?

 

[Tornik]

how full are the ssd?
cpu/gpu temp?

Thank you for the reply.

SSDs are about 60 percent full;
GPU temp is 43 C;
CPU temps are like this:

 

[rgd1101]

both ssd at 60% used?

 

[Tornik]

both ssd at 60% used?

C: drive has 106 GB free of 222 GB
D: drive has 243 GB free of 465 GB

So more like about 50% used on C and about 45% used on D

 

[Tornik]

I also can't see anything suspicious running in processes either.

P.S. Tab switching in browser, highlighting text and other basic operations like this are also affected by the lag.

 

[rgd1101]

malware scan the system?

 

[Tornik]

malware scan the system?

Malwarebyes scan says nothing suspicious;
I'm running Windows Security scan and so far it hasn't found anything either.

 

[rgd1101]

what the ram usage? after a while. when the lag appear ?

 

[Tornik]

what the ram usage? after a while. when the lag appear ?

The lag is there at the moment and RAM usage is at 35%. My RAM is overclocked too - once the Windows scan is over, I will try resetting it to default values in BIOS and see if that makes any difference.

Here's additional details on memory:

I have paging file set to automatic in Virtual Memory.

 

[Tornik]

I reset the RAM overclock and the issue is still there, so it wasn't that.

 

[Tornik]

I noticed in SSD performance stats in Task Manager that Average Response Time for C: drive occasionally spikes to over 20ms. Is this within expected range?

 

[rgd1101]

what the bios version?

 

[Tornik]

what the bios version?

F20 of 17/11/2016

 

[Tornik]

Updated BIOS to F21 version just to check if that would change anything. No effect.

 

[rgd1101]

everything look ok.
could try a fresh os install

 

[Tornik]

I think I figured out what the issue was, so I'll post for anyone who might search for this in the future. I checked Windows Event log, and under Application I saw the following error recurring:

"Faulting application name: ctfmon.exe, version: 10.0.19041.1, time stamp: 0x60c3fe88
Faulting module name: KERNELBASE.dll, version: 10.0.19041.804, time stamp: 0x0e9c5eae
Exception code: 0x00000675
Fault offset: 0x000000000010bd5c
Faulting process ID: 0xe4c
Faulting application start time: 0x01d701381acb77a6
Faulting application path: C:\WINDOWS\system32\ctfmon.exe
Faulting module path: C:\WINDOWS\System32\KERNELBASE.dll
Report ID: 9428aede-4ac1-4e9e-8d11-e82bf83bb4fd
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID: "

I checked info about ctfmon - it's an MS Office process used to control the Alternative User Input Text Input Processor and the Microsoft Office Language Bar. I simply terminated the process in Task Manager and disabled it in Startup, and the lag seems to be gone.