Windows 7: Windows Explorer has slowed markedly

In the past couple of months my win 7 Windows Explorer now takes up to 20 seconds of searching to finally land on the folder selected. This is much slower than it used to be. I guess I'm not at all knowledgeable on what the search process is when one loads Windows Explorer so I don't know where to look for problems. Generally, what things slow the search that Win Explorer goes through to load itself. Would a 3rd party file manager be a better bet rather than a long term investigation to find the problem in my system? I'm a good housekeeper on my machines but something is slowing Win Exp down markedly. And come to think of it the whole machine seems slower also.

I'm running Win 7 on an 64 bit Intel 2.8Ghz i7-860 Processor on an Asus P&P55D-E Pro mother board with 4 gig Ram and an Intel X-25 80gig C drive plus a Samsung Spinpoint T3 1 Terabyte hard drive.

Many thanks for any help!

Some good house keeping tools.
Disk Cleanup : Extended
Read through this and see if you care to do some or all of it.
Optimize Windows 7

A very nice program many of us use.
CCleaner - PC Optimization and Cleaning - Free Download

***If you do find any other program for cleaning or speeding up your computer please ask here before using. There is a bunch of bad programs on the net. ***

Thanks very much Layback Bear.......I appreciate the help. Yes, I'm a long time user of CCleaner Pro and it's a great program. As I said I'm fairly good at housekeeping. But what has got me really puzzled is what sort of exercise Win 7 goes through to load Explorer. Somewhere along the line I've added something or changed some folder structure that has markedly slowed my Explorer when running through all of the folder tree to finally load up. Something I've done has caused this delay of several seconds in finishing up its startup. I've begun backing up some old DVD's of good size, would that slow my OS down? I've only kept one or two on the disk at any one time.

I'll go through those great Optimizing steps one by one to clean my machine up.

One more thing just occurred to me: I've never hardly touched my SSD based on the stuff I've read. When I use my Auslogics Defragger I've always skipped my C drive which is the SSD. So it's stayed pretty much as when first built but it's got the OS on it which includes EXplorer, right? So maybe I should be doing something to clean or optimize that SSD?

Never defrag a SSD. No manufacture of any SSD recommend drfraging them.
I use the Intel Tool Box for my SSD. I would think every brand of SSD's have something along the same line as Intel.
You could also run this to check Windows y System Files.
SFC /SCANNOW Command - System File Checker
Many times if will fix problems with Windows Explorer.
Many 3rd party anti virus don't play well with Windows 7 and cause all kinds of problems. That is why I use MSE and MAM Pro. They all play well together.
Programs I recommend I use unless otherwise stated.

My machine is now slowing more and more and sometimes programs are just not opening and kind of ignoring my command clicks. If I reboot then things freshen up and stuff starts to happen normally for a while. Would a reload of Win 7 on my SSD help refresh this thing and restore original sparky speed......which I really miss. I'm wondering if my proliferation of files and folders and the ton of stuff I have stored on DropBox might be affecting my speed and response. Would a Win 7 reinstall help? Comments appreciated!