With Adobe Lightroom 3 (3.2 x64 on windows 7 in my case) it is almost impossible to import pictures. This is independent from their location; whether they are stored on CF, network or local disk gives the same results.
Scrolling is slow, (de)selecting pictures is slow, even moving the (mouse) cursor over the import dialog is slow and jerky. It seems like the import dialog freezes every 2 seconds and un-freezes a second later.
A lot of forums suggest a lot of solutions. My computer is fairly new and has got 8GB of RAM. The following 'solutions' didn't work: defragmentation, creating a new catalog, discarding all preview images, ...
Suddenly I found the solution to the problem in my case. The import dialogue was really slow when my phone was connected to the computer through ActiveSync. When it was disconnected Lightroom 3 was blazing fast!
Usually the first thing I do when I get at my computer is syncing my phone and leave it connected. This is why I didn't discover this horrible impact it made on Lightroom's performance at first!
The phone is an HTC HD2 - Windows Mobile 6.5 - connected with Active Sync to a Windows 7 x64 box.
The general problem that may be an explanation for other people's slowness might be the import dialogue probing all file systems on the computer. Even really slow ones, like the file system on my HTC phone. It even might be a slow network drive or mounted archives or tape drives (?) or floppy disks or your camera connected with an USB cable... you name it.
Hopefully this solution will be of some benefit to you, too! In my case: Mystery Solved.
