Xp start menu lag

I have installed Windows XP SP2 on MSI board with 2gb of ram and Nvidia 9600 card with 500gb hard drive. Sometimes when I try to open up the list in Start menu, then it will take up to 20 seconds before it will fill in the list of program. All other things are working fine. I did a check for adware but nothing was there. I also added more ram but it didnt help. It actually started when I added 500 or more icons in my start menu with the installation of lot of yahoo mini games. Can anyone please help me out? Thanks.

I think that it might be needing to prepare cache of that icons before it pops them for you. You can always try to group 5000 icons in folders? But in anyways you wont be able to select if there are 500.

Thanks, I have categorized them as puzzle games or word games and each of them might have about 50 games in each folder in the Start Menu folder itself. Is it that Windows XP cannot support that much icon, do you have any other ideas how to solve this issue?

Why dont you try to increase the icon cache size and see if that helps? The below might also work. It actually depends where the wrong icons are placed on shortcuts but I think that it might help with the loading of so many icons too:

Line 121. Increase Icon Cache
http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_tweaks.htm

Thanks for the help everyone. I have already applied icon cache tweak by increasing it before hand if not the lag is worst, it will simply pause or hand for 2 minutes or longer. After this tweak the pause or hang reduced to around 60 seconds. Do you have any other tweak? Thanks

Well, you can add more ram or try to increase icon cache size and see if that helps?