nView slowdown

I've experienced some serious UI performance issues on my Windows XP workstation lately. Programs like Eclipse, Safari, have been excruciatingly slow. In particular, some string entry boxes in the Eclipse launch configuration dialog have been so slow that they only manage to echo 2-3 characters per second. Something was seriously wrong, and it didn't seem fair to blame Eclipse or Safari without some investigating.

To get some idea of what the processes were doing, I used Process Monitor, and added a filter to show only activities from "eclipse.exe". Collecting data from 15 seconds and typing some data in a file generated 12629 events (842 events/sec). 11304 of these (89%) were registry calls to HKLM\SOFTWARE\NVIDIA Corporation\Global\NVTweak\DisableWindowCaching. WTF?

Googling around a little proved that I'm not alone. Some related links:

• http://www.tech-archive.net/Archive/VB/microsoft.public.vb.general.discussion/2007-10/msg01176.html
• http://forums.nvidia.com/lofiversion/index.php?t48735.html
• http://winhlp.com/node/188
• http://social.expression.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/web/thread/f99c5e4f-20f9-47fa-8e99-93e943df62a1

I solved the problem by creating the registry key with a DWORD value of 0. Now everything goes much faster...