Win7 very slow viewing contents of large network folders

I have some network folders with 1500, 3000, and 5000 files. It's very slow opening those folders just to see the files anywhere from 15-30 sec. I've read lots of google articles and even several from this forum. Many articles are several years old, so I'm not sure how relevent. I've customized the folders in Win 7 for general items and checked "also apply this template to subfolders". I went to power options and chose advanced and changed the setting "turn off HD after 20 min to 1200 min (20 hours). I've disabled sleep mode.

I have indexing off for all my HD's, because this is an audio recording computer and I try to stop as many Windows background tasks from operating in the background. If turning indexing back on will solve this problem, then I'd try it.

As soon as I boot up into Windows 7 and try to access those 3 network folders I get this long delay, yet if I try to access local Windows 7 folders they open up right away and have 5000 files. So my problem is with the network. I have 2 XP network computers wired and the latest updated Win 7. Is there a solution?

MilesAhead said:

How fast is the network?

Practically speaking I think your solution is to break the network folders into subfolders with fewer files each. Or get faster network hardware.

Edit: depending on file type another way to speed up would be to disable thumbnails and use Details View.

the computer is a dual boot computer with XP and Win 7. XP works just fine and doesn't have a long delay just to view the files in a folder. I never use thumbnails, it always opens with a details view, because many times I want to sort by date immediately. Clearly Win 7 is either designed badly in this respect or there is a away to get it to handle this situation like XP does. I'm looking for a way to change the way Win 7 is doing this, so it does this like XP does. I hope that someone is familiar with this problem and knows a solution and why Win 7 is taking so long..