Q:

Windows Server 2008 expanding folders is Slow

On several Windows 2008 Server machines I'll log onto, when expanding folders in Windows Explorer with the treeview on the left, at times, it can take forever for the nodes to expand.  Oftentimes there'll be some type of animation icon.  I'll also usually see a BG progress meter in the address bar at the top of Windows Explorer, indicating it's looking or searching thru files.  The folders I'm expanding will sometimes have little or no files in them.  So I'm clueless what Explorer is taking so much time for.  With other versions of Windows, even when there are many files in the sub-folders, expanding the nodes is basically instantaneous.
When this happens, I can usually start double-clicking on the folders on the right side listview to drill down very quickly.  I've seen this with both Server 2008 RTM and R2 -- both seem to have this problem.
This is very frustrating overall dealing with a slow OS.  Any ideas or tips on something I can do?  Thanks.

A:

In my experience this is quite often an active virus scanner aggressively rescanning files in the subfolders of the folder you are expanding.  (Editorial: I find this behavior extremely annoying to myself and to all of my customers)  Run some type of process monitor (procmon from SysInternals comes to mind immediately) and open one of those difficult folders.  Then stop capture on procmon and examine what is happening.

