I uninstalled and deleted its folder but it made no difference.
Lately I upgraded the nextgen gallery plugin to v2. Disabling this seems to have made the difference. WordPress is telling me there is a version 2.07 available. Now options optimizer loads and shows me this (but nothing else):
Options Optimizer
Options Optimizer is installed and working correctly.
The Options Optimizer allows you to change plugin options so that they don’t autoload. It also allows you to delete orphan options.
In WordPress, some options are loaded whenever WordPress loads a page. These are marked as autoload options. This is done to speed up WordPress and prevent the programs from hitting the database every time some plugin needs to look up an option. Automatic loading of options at start-up makes WordPress fast, but it can also use up memory for options that will seldom or never be used.
You can safely switch options so that they don’t load automatically. Probably the worst thing that will happen is that the page will paint a little slower because the option is retrieved separately from other options. The best thing that can happen is there is a lower demand on memory because the unused options are not loaded when WordPress starts loading a page.
When plugins are uninstalled they are supposed to clean up their options. Many options do not do any clean-up during uninstall. It is quite possible that you have many orphan options from plugins that you deleted long ago. These are autoloaded on every page, slowing down your pages and eating up memory. These options can be safely marked so that they will not autoload. If you are sure they are not needed you can delete them.
You can change the autoload settings or delete an option on the form below. Be aware that you can break some plugins by deleting their options. I do not show most of the built-in options used by WordPress. The list below should be just plugin options.
It is far safer to change the autoload option value to “no” than to delete an option. Only delete an option if you are sure that it is from an uninstalled plugin. If you find your pages slowing down, turn the autoload option back to “on”.
In order to see if the change in autoload makes any difference, you can view the source of your blog pages and look for an html comment that shows your current memory usage and the load time and number of queries for the page. This is added to the footer by this plugin. It is an html comment so you have to view the page source to see it.
Deactivate this plugin when you are not using it in order to save memory and speed your page.
