Click on Favorites, Mouse Jumps Around, IE Locks Up for 30 Seconds

Question

Hello all,
I am having a strange problem with Internet Explorer.  I have all of the latest MS patches for everything.  When I open Internet Explorer (I have version 11), and click on my favorites icon (the star icon in the top right), IE locks up on me for
about 30 seconds.  It eventually comes back after that time and everything is normal, I have access to all of my favorites.  However, if I close IE and reopen it, the same thing happens again.  If I leave it open, the issue does not seem to
happen in the same instance of IE.  I have tried clearing all of my temporary files with no change.  I did a packet capture and noticed that when I click on my favorites icon, my PC ARP's for an IP address that no longer exists on my network
(my private LAN) - it ARP's about 15-20 times and stops exactly when IE returns to normal.  So the two events sync up.  I did find some entries for this particular IP address under "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\RunMRU"
and I have deleted them and rebooted.  I cannot find any reference to this IP anywhere else in the registry.  This IP address used to be a NAS drive that I had - accessed via backslash-backslash-sharename - but I decommissioned it.  I'm out
of ideas here - anybody ever run into this or have any suggestions?  Any help would be greatly appreciated!!

Answer 1

Robert, thanks for the reply.
I did a bit more messing around with running traces with netsh.  I did manage to drill down to find the actual ARP's that I was seeing, but I could not map that back using process monitor.  I just don't know enough about using it.
However, I did some tinkering and found something strange.  I am not smart enough to put it all together, maybe somebody can help me.  I started removing and adding back my individual ".url" favorites files one by one from/to their location
under my "c:\users\username\favorites" folder and narrowed it down to a single favorite.  Here was the original favorite file contents:
[DEFAULT]
BASEURL=http://www.wireless.att.com/home/
[InternetShortcut]
URL=http://www.att.com/
IDList=
IconFile=http://www.att.com/favicon.ico
IconIndex=1
HotKey=0
[{...cut...}]
Prop3=19,2
If I open IE from a fresh reboot and click my favorites icon, the issue occurred.  The next time it happened again was exactly 60 seconds after I initially opened IE the first time.  I could open and close it as many times as I could within that
60 seconds and not have the issue occur again.  After the 60 seconds were up, if I opened IE again and clicked my favorites, the issue occurred again.  That sounds pretty strange, I know.
In any case, I did some more messing around with the file contents and found that if I change the "IconIndex" to "0" (zero), the problem went away.  You can directly hit that IconFile and it will display the AT&T icon. 
If I delete and re-create the shortcut by going directly to AT&T's website and adding to favorites, it would recreate the file again the same way with the IconIndex set to 1.  If I change it to zero, the problem goes away.
None of this makes any sense to me.  But I have worked around the issue by changing that IconIndex to zero.