The new desktop computer I bought finally arrived yesterday and I was all excited to break it open and begin playing.  As usual, I installed a completely clean version of the operating system (Windows 8.1) and my entire development environment.  Everything installed smoothly and I was moving along until I noticed a small annoyance.

When I tried to right-click on the desktop to bring up my context menu, it was super slow.  It took nearly half a minute.

This was clearly not correct so I did some searching and discovered that this can be caused by third-party software attaching itself to the context menu.  Unfortunately, this was a clean install and TortoiseHG was the only software installed that used the context menu.  Since I have used that before with no issues, I assumed that was not the issue.

A deeper search indicated that problems loading the context menu are sometimes caused by incompatible or out-of-date graphics drivers.  Since I had just done a clean install, I figured there was probably a newer driver out there for my fancy NVidia GeForce graphics card.

A quick search and sure enough, NVidia had a whole suite of drivers for me to install.  A short reboot later and my context menu opens immediately.

Just goes to show, you never know what might affect your performance until you test it yourself.