In your opinion, do you think that just adding more and more stuff (as in a lot of addons over the years) to FS9 and FSX would cause a noticable slowing down of opening folders? To get from "my computer" to the aircraft files seems to take a lot longer than a few years ago. Each folder can take up to 15 seconds to open. FS9 and FSX work fine as do most all other PC features. Just having to go beyond "my computer" is slow when clicking on subsequent files.Curtis

Do you ever run Microsoft's Disk Cleanup and Disk Defragmenter?

Yes, both regularly.Curtis

I was still wondering if this is or has happened to anyone else out there?Curtis

CurtisYes I found that you do get this slow down over time. I installed an AI traffic program and this lengthened my opening times almost 10 fold. I now use an SSD for FSX and I no longer notice the "apparent" slow down but still some folders do not open 'instantaneously'. I think its due in part to the number of aircraft involved so that when you want to choose a new plane FSX has to wade through a huge amount of data in SIMOBJECTS to display all of the planes. I unticked "show all variants" and it seemed a little more responsive.It seems to be something you expereience as you add more and more 3rd party addon-ons. :( RegardspH

Thanks Peter, I appreciate the info. What I'm really asking is that my PC performance is slow to open files, the sim loads in a reasonable time considering all the addons I have. Do you think by having a lot of FS stuff on my hard drive could cause this? Could it be a bug of some sort, even though I do have a good protection program?Curtis

Hi CurtisYes it could be any number of things and not necessarily due to anything on the FSX drive. Something may have changed in the OS to cause the slow down. You could use the event viewer or perfmon (I'm no expert) to pin down what may be slowing the file open process down. I found that an external USB 2.0 drive made folder opening longer than I expected!! This is one of those annoying issues that may not be resolved easily (except with a clean reinstall of evrything - last resort!! :( )BTW what sort of effects are you seeing due to this slow down?RegardspH

No noticable effects to the flight sim once it loads, which takes a minute or two, but with all the addons I kind of expect that.Curtis