Dell - Control Panel freeze
If you own a Dell notebook, you know the problem. You open the control panel and what happens next, is seeing the control panel freeze. Not only that, but also the whole explorer.exe process stops functioning.
Step 1 – Locating the problem
What causes this problem, is the Dell Wireless WLAN Card Utility being loaded on the startup of the control panel. The culprit is located in the following directory:
Windows\System32
There you will find – after a long search probably – a file called BCMWLCPL.CPL. This is the one that needs to be moved to a random other location. I chose for moving it to a new folder inside System32, called BCMWLCPL. You could also delete it, as you don't need it anymore, but just in case, we'll keep a copy of it.
Afterwards you created this folder, you move, not copy, this .CPL file to the newly created folder. It should then 'look' like this:
Windows\System32\BCMWLCPL\BCMWLCPL.CPL
Step 2 – Update the shortcuts
Although this step isn't necessary, I advise you to finish this step as well, as we like to keep our system clean, well I do atleast. There still exists a shorcut in the start menu, pointing to this old location.
So, to finish this, open up your start menu, click All programs and look for following folder 'Dell Wireless'. Right click 'Dell Wireless WLAN Card Utility', choose 'Properties' and point it to the new location of BCMWLCPL.CPL. Ofcourse, this is the location you moved the .CPL file to in the step earlier described.
And now you're done! If you already haven't opened the control panel yet, this is a nice opportunity to do so as you'll see if you did it right or not!
Enjoy your 'freezeless' control panel!