Sometimes in windows explorer, I've noticed clicking on different locations (especially removable media such as thumb drives) can be rather slow, somewhere in the range of 30 seconds to 3 minutes. This is not a hardware issue as I can bring up a dos prompt and get a directory listing of said thumb drive with no wait at all.

So, this seems to be a problem with windows explorer, but we don't have to put up with it.

Workaround:

Typing the address of the location you want in the address bar, while maybe taking an extra second or two to perform, the contents seem to load up immediately, without the 3 minute delay.