Explorer is slow because it's extensible. All the thumbnails and extra stuff in the context menu is what slows it down. There's some pathological cases like "opening a folder with an MP3 file in" which puts it into scanning all the files for ID3 tags.
Fpilot is a great example of how it's possible to make something MUCH faster by limiting the feature set.
(also some of the NTFS APIs are horribly slow for extended information)
Fpilot is a great example of how it's possible to make something MUCH faster by limiting the feature set.
(also some of the NTFS APIs are horribly slow for extended information)