Why does it take a few seconds before the QAP menu appear?

Before showing its main menu, QAP needs to refresh the content of its dynamic submenus (Recent Folders, Recent Files, Frequent Folders, Frequent Files and Drives). This normally takes only one or two seconds but sometimes longer. In this post, I explain what happens during this refresh and explore various ways to make this delay shorter.

The time needed to refresh the QAP menu depends on the content to be added to the dynamic menus (above all, the number of new items in the “Recent Items” system folder since the last QAP menu call) and the time it takes to Windows takes to provide the refreshed info required to build the menus.

For this reason, the time needed to refresh the QAP menu is not consistent. If you’ve been using your PC for a long period without opening the QAP menu, there will be many items to add from the Recent Items. Also, sometimes it seems that Windows has some background tasks needed to be performed before responding to QAP, making the delay a bit longer.

There are different ways to reduce the refresh delay.

Detach dynamic menus

Normally, dynamic menus are “attached” to the main QAP menu. They appear as a submenu where you can scroll to the item you wish to launch or move to another submenu. With the “detached menu” option, when you select a dynamic menu, the main menu is closed and the dynamic menu appear stand-alone in a separate popup menu. The advantage of this option is that the main menu does not need to be refreshed each time you open it. The dynamic menu is refreshed only on-demand, when you open it. The disadvantage is that if you can’t move back to other sections of the main menu. If you change your mind and do not want to open an item from the dynamic menu, you need to open the main menu again. Personally, I find it more convenient to have these menus attached and prefer to wait a short time.

This page explains how to enable the detached menus option: Can I speed up the QAP menu display by having dynamic menus detached from the main menu?

Removing unused dynamic menus

If you never use the dynamic menus Recent Folders, Recent Files, Frequent Folders, Frequent Files menus (under the In the Works) and the Drives menu (under My QAP Essentials), you can remove all or some of them from your QAP menu. You need to remove both Recent Folders and Recent Files menus to see a change. Removing only one will have no effect. The same is true for the Frequent Folders and Frequent Files menus.

Disabling the QAP database

The QAP database is mainly used to collect the data needed to build the Frequent Folders and Frequent Files menus. If you do not use these menus, you can disable the database in Options, Database. If you do, you should also remove the Frequent Folders and Frequent Files menus under In the works because they will not be populated anymore.