Resolved! (I can sleep now)

TweakUI has an option to disable "detect accidental double clicks". Folders and apps waste no time opening and are instantaneous.

Why? Where was this setting? Some sort of registry setting?

Resolved! (I can sleep now)

TweakUI has an option to disable "detect accidental double clicks". Folders and apps waste no time opening and are instantaneous.

Why? Where was this setting? Some sort of registry setting?

I'm glad you solved your problem! But, first, I must point out a correction to my above post. In order to test out Idea-3 you must SELECT the Do Not Cache Thumbnails checkbox and then APPLY. I had the logic reversed. DOH! It still might be useful to test that one out.

Yup, I am well aware of that registry setting, the so-called Detect Accidental Double Clicks. That click timer thing was one of those horrible ideas in WinXP that I personally disengaged long ago. The theory was to protect the end-user from DOUBLE clicks that might execute a program when they meant to single click (i.e., all people are robotic internet browser web monkeys and MS will save them). What it actually did IMHO was to cause tons of files and folders to be renamed because the intended double-click often became a RENAME (like an F2 keypress) which selects and highlights the file/folder name and then, yikes. The next thing you see are strangely named objects side by side with all the typical New Folder accidents.

Anyway, yes, this is a registry setting. It was found in the WinGuides XP Edition from 2002 and can be seen right here.

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced]
"UseDoubleClickTimer"=-
"UseDoubleClickTimer"="0"

Presumably if that value does not exist ("UseDoubleClickTimer"=-) it would be the same as "UseDoubleClickTimer"="0". In other words, set it to "1" in order to activate the timer and thus prevent accidental double-clicks. Set it to "0" or remove it to NOT use the timer. HOWEVER, to further complicate things, like all per-user registry settings if this value does not exist here under HKEY_CURRENT_USER, it still would be active if it in fact existed under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. Traditionally HKCU takes precedence over HKLM, so to be absolutely sure you are testing a registry hack, it should be done in HKCU.

One more thing though. I went to my test machine (bare WinXP SP3) and carefully tested Single-Clicks with and without the registry hack and I see no visible difference in folder opening speed in Explorer. I believe this setting may work in conjunction with other tweaks. Either that, or this box is so fast (no McAfee, no Indexing, blazing CPU) that my eyes will not acknowledge any change.

One more thing though. I went to my test machine (bare WinXP SP3) and carefully tested Single-Clicks with and without the registry hack and I see no visible difference in folder opening speed in Explorer. I believe this setting may work in conjunction with other tweaks. Either that, or this box is so fast (no McAfee, no Indexing, blazing CPU) that my eyes will not acknowledge any change.

Wow. That seems to be some fast machine you have there. I see a noticeable difference.

Well thank you for the suggestions and support CTH.