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Is it possible to give a hint to Explorer.exe that it's dealing with slow drive, for example, something like a network share? Explorer should go easy with it, i.e. not constantly looking up desktop.ini attributes.

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Explorer does not use Desktop.ini unless the folder has the "read-only" and/or "system" flags, specifically for network performance reasons. (Not sure about equivalent flags for file metadata lookup, though.) – grawity Aug 22 '11 at 13:05
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The most important thing you can do to speed up Explorer is to disable thumnails. This limits any "automatic" access to polling the filesystem.

To do so, run regsvr32 /u shimgvw.dll and regsvr32 /u shmedia.dll in a command prompt (Start->All Programs->Accessories).

In addition, you might also want to increase your filesystem RAM cache so that XP doesn't have to keep calling the filesystem for files. You can do with with the SysInternals utility CacheSet.

And if you're paranoid, please back up. Windows XP is going the way of the dinosaur and behaves kind of like one.

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FWIW, Explorer doesn't poll the filesystem; it uses the change notification API. – grawity Aug 26 '11 at 9:02
No matter what, it will eventually cause a filesysyem read though… – digitxp Aug 26 '11 at 12:46
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