Windows Explorer very slow to load folders

I have just about had it with Vista's Explorer. Folders with a lot of content (usually vidoes and pics) or simply files, can take up to a minute or even longer, to load all the thumbnails. This is rather tough, especially as doing anything in the folder (such as starting an exe, or viewing a video) slows down considerably until the folder view (with that bar going across the top) has finished loading.

Even telling Vista to never display thumbnails doesn't work. I have spent the last few weeks with Vista's theme being the old Windows Classic (98-style look) thinking that the reduced load might enable Explorer to display folder views quicker--and that might have helped out some, but this problem still recurs. I had this problem with a gig of RAM, and upgraded to 2 gigs, and still find the same problem.

I'm about to roll back to XP again--the only thing that keeps me from Ubuntu now is MS Office, which I really do like. Is there anything else I can do in Vista, to deal with this?