CNRL>Click pop-up menu delay?

[walkingmac]

I am running 10.2.8 and everything has ben fine.... until the past few days. An annoying problem has developed. When i cnrl>click (usually just the initial time I do this in each application) it takes an abnormal amount of time to generate the pop-up menu.

Basic example: I could load iChat. If I mispell a word and i ctrl>click on it to get the suggested correct spelling it can take around 30 sec to get the pop-up.
Another would be in safari. when i load the app and click on a folder of bookmarks in my Bookmarks Bar it too can take 30 sec.

So it is not limited to just standard pop-ups, but also those types of 'pop-ups' if that makes sense. After I do the initial pop-up in that application, after that it takes the usual instantaneous behavior I have come to expect.

Anyone got any ideas?

 

[walkingmac]

anyone?

 

[Rower_CPU]

Have you tried the usual repair permissions, trash preferences upkeep?

 

[Makosuke]

You didn't say what kind of computer you're running, but I frequently see a delay on slower computers before the first menu in an application appears, be it pop-up or drop-down. The delay, best I can figure, is caused by the OS having to pre-load the menu contents, but once they've been loaded, it's pretty much instantaneous.

This isn't perceptable on faster computers, and I'd bet that heavy loading of the OS and/or heavy disk fragmentation could exacerbate this, since it'd take more time to load whatever. The spelling issue you cite would be a prime example, since it could take some time for the spelling subroutine to load.

Things to try: have you checked top or activity viewer to see if there's a lot of processor loading going on? Perhaps the change occurred because of something you installed that's loading the processor more.

Is your disk almost full? It could be an issue with fragmentation or something like that, as well.

Lastly, did you install any utilities or turn anything new on recently? It'd be easy for a utillity or OS tool that loads in a popup menu to cause a long delay while it was loading when you first accessed a popup menu.

Again, you might check top or Process Viewer and see what's using CPU during one of these menu delays (have the terminal window or Process Viewer window in the background when you control click, and watch for something using a bunch of CPU).

Good luck.