I have experienced the exact same issues but I wrote it off as Vid Card driver related. I shut down and restart explorer.exe to fix and it goes fine for awhile. Since I am continually screwing with things, I have gotten used to it as I have gotten used to alot of things with Vista. The slow taskbar is a sign of things to fail.

Here's the scoop on my dillema:

Everything else is fine with my system, I've discovered, it's only when the Suns theme is enabled when I have problems, so that eliminates the possibility of my computer being bad. (that is solved, at least).

Not sure what to do here. Either a refund would be good on my Suns theme (if possible), or just a patch for it to get it to work. Stardock Gurus, please!

Tom

Your best bet is probably to contact support directly via https://esupport.stardock.com/index.php?_m=tickets&_a=submit

and reference this post.  You should get an automated receipt within a few hours, and an actual response within 24-48 hours.  Don't repeatedly contact them between their responses, each time you do it resets you in their que order.

I have a similar issue on my Vista Home Premium x64... the Start Menu opens OK, but when opening the All Programs list and clicking on a folder, the busy cursor hovers for a while and nothing happens.  I did find a workaround by clicking the back button and reopening All Programs... the folder is then open and displaying its contents.

At first I thought that it may have been Deskscapes, but I have since uninstalled that and the problem still exists.  However, it still may be related to a Stardock app (rather than a theme/skin) as I did not notice it prior to installing Impulse and my Stardock apps.  I may be wrong, however, as Winstep Xtreme's Workshelf and wsxHelper seem at times to hog CPU resources and thus slows my system and Explorer.exe (which the Start Menu and desktop services depend on) slightly.

Hmmm, it's a bit of a mystery, but hopefully someone will help us get to the bottom of it.