Not all our cases are crashes, leaks, or high CPU. Sometimes the problems we are faced with are purely a question of why a given application runs slow on a particular version of Windows versus another version of windows. In other cases an application may just start running slow for no reason. OK, not likely. There is ALWAYS SOME RESASON. Something changed! In this case, the customer reported that an application started running slow when booted into “Normal Mode”, but when the OS was booted in safe mode, the application would run fast. In this particular case the customer reported that a given operation went from taking just a few seconds (safe mode) to several minutes (normal mode). Further research found that the problem was related to accessing the registry and registry performance in general. At this point I’m already thinking, “Registry Access?” and “Safe Mode”. What could affect registry access that does not run in safe mode? Well lots of services DO NOT start in safe mode. What kind of services could affect registry calls? Antivirus? Maybe… Let’s look deeper.