Add/Remove Programs Hangs - Please Wait While List Is Being Populated

My hard drive with my OS on it ended up going bad. When it went bad, I had a slave drive with some data on it set up that happened to get corrupted along the way. So I removed the bad drive, put a new drive in and installed a fresh copy of xp w sp2. Did all my updates, everything ran perfect. Now I left my slave drive alone with my date on it. Some of my data got corrupted and if you went looking around in there, a message would come up drive not formatted if I opened certain folder on that drive. Some of the data was still good. Well anyways I noticed on my brand new fresh install, if I went to add/remove programs it would sit there and hang. It would say please wait while list is being populated. If I let it sit long enough it would eventually come up but something was definitely wrong. So while I am sitting here waiting for the list to load, I noticed my hard drive activity light was lit on my tower and seemed like the hard drive was very busy. So after googling some more and not finding any help I figured I would try and fix it myself.


I ended up getting what I could off my slave drive and downloaded maxblast and cleared everything out and re-set the drive and deleted and created a new partition. Well guess what, my add remove programs now works perfect after clearing out my slave drive. I'm guessing what was happening was for whatever reason the add remove programs was trying to scan Drive D: for whatever reason and it had corrupt data on it which is why it took so long. I'm not saying this is going to solve all hang ups, but I tried every tip I could find and no dice. This actually worked. So if you are having trouble take a good look at your hard drives and make sure they are in good working order.