>Some folks apparently can't get over the relatively "plain" appearance and lack of Aero desktop. Personally, I'd prefer to turn off a lot of "eye candy" if it means a "snappier" UI. I do recall when I'd started using XP that one of the first things I did was switch to "Classic mode" because I didn't care much for the "Fisher-Price" styling of the default desktop.

There's something fundamentally wrong with the icons system in Windows. I've used filemon/processmon or whatever the name, and discovered that the icon cache just doesn't do anything - perhaps stores the filenames - so for each refresh of a folder display, each icon requires several folder reads and file open/close operations, leading to the actual resource file (an .ico, .dll, .exe most of the time).

I'm using TotalCommander for file manipulation, and among wise things in it, there's an option to show no icons at all. Whenever I do that, the speed just soars. Obviously, nowadays even such an advanced successor of Norton Commander can't access the disk directly and read folders at will, it has to go through filesystem API - and thus suffers the same pitfalls... except Ghisler found that parameter where it says "no icons please (we aren't orthodox)".

Tried this with several versions of windows (XP, W7, S2003 and S2008) and the effect is the same. Much much faster without icons.