Here's something I just discovered; maybe by sharing it will help others, or
maybe an MVP can tell us why this happens. This pertains to Word from Office
2003 under XP-Pro.

I've been working on an instruction manual, about 50, 8-1/2 by 11 pages, and
have been inserting screen shots 'on the fly' as I write the text. With the
application I'm writing about running in another window, I use HyperSnap-DX
to capture pertinent areas of the screen, to reduce the shot to gray scale,
and to create a .jpg on the Desktop. Then I maximize Word and do an
InsertPicture to pop the photo into the document. If it's the wrong size, I
do a FormatPicture once it's in place.

Well, even though the .jpg is only 50k or so, it's been taking almost 30
seconds for the picture to appear in the Word doc after the InsertPicture
command, and of course the screen is frozen while the picture is loading. I
didn't recall this situation from previous experience and wondered what the
heck was happening this time.

When you initiate the InsertPicture command, a box comes up to locate the
file you want to import. I've been doing a BrowseDesktop, which pops up
another sub-window showing all image files on the Desktop. WELL... if the
View for this little window is set for thumbnails, the picture takes 30
seconds to import. BUT if the View is set to List or to Details, importing
the picture is almost instant.

Has anyone else come across this?