Try this...
1. Make sure that your settings allow you to view system folders. (Folder options contains a switch for this.)
2. Navigate to the WIndows\Prefetch folder.
3. Locate the file for the Handifast program. There will be a file that closely matches it by name with the pre-fetch extension.
4. Delete any file that resembles Handifast.
Here is the deal... I have seen this with HSH a few times over the years.
From Wikipedia:
Quote:
The Prefetcher is a component of versions of Microsoft Windows starting with Windows XP.[1] It is a component of the Memory Manager that speeds up the Windows boot process, and shortens the amount of time it takes to start up programs.
Application prefetching works in a similar fashion, but is instead localized to a single application's startup. Only the first 10 seconds of activity are monitored.
The prefetcher stores... in the "Prefetch" folder in the root Windows directory (typically \Windows\Prefetch).
... application trace files are a concatenation of the application's executable name, a hyphen, a hexadecimal representation of the hash of the path the file resides in, and a ".pf" extension.
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When a program starts up there the pre-fetcher (for lack of a better word) "records" what the software needs to load. It stores these instructions in a pre-fetch file (.pf) so that the next time the program starts the OS is "more ready" to load the program into memory, thus opening the program a little faster.
My experience is that occasionally the pre-fetch file for a particular application becomes corrupt. Deleting it solves the problem.
On the next run the pre-fetcher will recreate a new .pf file.
Give it a try. There is no downside to this.