“My Computer” hangs when accessing it

This just started happening to my work PC (Windows XP SP3) about a week or so
ago. It was very annoying, mainly because I rely heavily on the CTRL+E hotkey to
access “My Computer” on the fly. Well today I had enough. First stop was Google.
My searching resulted in many sites recommending to launch Explorer, go to Tools
then Folder Options and click on the View tab. From there uncheck “Automatically
search for network folders and printers” (the first option) and then click OK
(or Apply then OK if you’re that guy). Yeah, no dice, still slow. Next step was
to start disabling software and running services, I was sure Trend Micro
OfficeScan or Apple were behind the hang ups. Still nothing. Well after another
20 seconds of waiting for “My Computer” to load, I decided to start going
through my mapped drives to see if perhaps one of those was bad. Four mapped
drives, the first three were fine. Then came number four. I double-clicked it
and sure as shit, it hung for a moment, and then displayed an Explorer window
showing my C: drive. Not a good sign. Well I disconnected the drive and tried
CTRL+E. Surprise, everything is loading up as it should. Funny enough, I would
have expected the option I unchecked to have possibly resolved the issue. Guess
not, but now I’m back in business.