Heavy HDD activity when viewing 'subfolders'

Hi

Not sure how to put this problem, so I'll just try and describe it.
Basically, I get this problem when using Windows (XP Pro) Explorer.

If I expand a folder (in the left hand pane of Explorer), which contains 20 subfolders (for example), my HDD drive starts churning away with lots of activity

During this time, the little '+' sign next to each of the 20 subfolders start to disappear slowly one by one (from the bottom upwards)

Once all the '+' signs have disappeared, my HDD activity stops

Has anyone got any ideas what's going on....I hope I've explained the problem clearly.

Thanks
Tony

Edit: 'Subject' description updated slightly

Edited by Tony76 (Thu 09-Jul-09 21:20:31)

Two things I would check:

1. Is the disk heavily fragmented?
2. How much free space is there on the disk?

Thanks for the reply AnotherExPipex.
(Small world....I'm actually another ExPipex'er as well )

I just checked the disk stats...the partition is ~250Gb in size, with ~140Gb free.

And according to the Windows defrag tool, I "do not need to defragment this volume".

Wonder what else I could check

delete all the thumbs.db files you can find in a search.

I'm actually another ExPipex'er as well

indeed. Wasn't it a relief to get away from them.

Obviously your problem is not trivial. There are a few things mentioned in this thread that you might like to look at next.

indeed. Wasn't it a relief to get away from them.

lol, i suppose so....but they could have been worse


Thanks for the link to that thread...looks interesting!
There are quite a few suggestions in there, so it'll take a little time to go through them all.

I'l let you know how it goes

Many thanks 12eason....I'll give this a go as well

fwiw, the problem is generally caused by corrupt caches. Deleting the cache files forces windows to rebuild them.

In reply to a post by 12eason:

delete all the thumbs.db files you can find in a search.

would be my first suggestion too

In reply to a post by 12eason:

Deleting the cache files forces windows to rebuild them.

Just for info, how do you do this?