Why is it taking forever to move a folder to the recycle bin?

That tended to happen here before and not any more with a clean of 7 seen to at the end of May. Generally it's a slow down of the explorer.exe process being experienced.

A few fast steps are a run of the System File Checker "sfc /scannow" at the Start>Run or command prompt options as well as scheduling Check Disk with the "chkdsk /r" repair switch added there or the Check Now button in the C drive's properties>Tool tab.

Even after a good clean install on a brand new primary if not seeing a bad install(incomplete) the Disk Cleanup and other system tools may be needed to clean up some of the lesser items that come up. The other factor which can take longer disregarding the size of any folder being dumped but the location on the drive especially a larger capacity model.

The OS starts early working out generally from the inner most part of the platters on a mechanical drive and accesses faster then the back of the drive after tons of things eventually get added on. Slower access means slower deletion.

Could it be that the bin and/or the folder is on a disk that is not spinning at this moment. Then you have to wait for the disk to first spin up. Next time listen to the sounds in the box.

It could also be that your hard drive is fragmented and Windows has to look all over the hard drive to find all the pieces parts before sending to recycle bin.

Or the folder contains numerous fragmented files! Generally the automatic maintaintence seen with Vista and 7 keeps the fragmentation down to next to 0% without even scheduling any run of the DiskDefrag tool. Yet you still find a number of individual files heavily fragmented being stored in folders not having any effect on overall performance as far as file indexing.

The spin down and startup of a drive if you have the "turn hard drives off after 20 minutes" set in the present power plan will tend to park drives after so long without any activity. To cure that here I simply changed that to the "never" turn hard disks off to allow prompt access and cut hackup times down as well as any deletions of temp files and folder.

whs and Layback Bear both made some good observations on those two factors that can be a part of this. Windows itself will it's own periods of slow times as well from what I have seen working with huge folders running into the hundreds of gigs where copy and paste becomes the real time consumer here!

As far as any drive seeing bad sectors that's always a possibility even for a new drive. When a drive starts failing on you however you will know something is wrong in a very short period of time! Windows will take longer to load. Programs will see more errors for no apparent reason or crash while in use. You may even think there's a memory problem.

Here you go! The Pinform Defraggler will take care of that for you fast enough! Defraggler - File and Disk Defragmentation - Free Download