Windows 7: Windows 7 SLOW reading dir of PNGs

Hey all. I've noticed Windows 7 is painfully slow when reading a directory of PNG files, while jpg files load nearly instantly. Anyone have any clues? I have a lot of graphics folders to work with and everytime I hit one that's loaded with pngs, the green (I guess it's indexing bar) SLOWLY creeps across the exporer window while Windows 7 tries to read the PNGs.

Is there a setting to fix this? No problem at all with jpgs.
(Windows 7 32 on newly built box with 4 gigs ram)

Hi Ben,

Can you check and see what program is the PNG associated with ? Just right click on any of the PNG file and go to properties there see what Program its set to open with ?
Try to change it to Widows Photo viewer see whether any improvement is there

Hope this helps

Thanks for the reply. Pngs and Jpgs are both associated with Widows Photo viewer. For what it's worth, I've converted the pngs to jpgs and am making sure my screen capture programs save to .jpg. I know Png is a more complicated format, so I'll just chalk it up to Windows 7 not playing well with large directories of them...

Might try running the PNGs though a optimizer like, psydk.org - PngOptimizer