Network shares that are unavailable slowed my Vista down to a crawl
On my home net I have 2 XP boxes, a Mandriva box and a sparkling new shiny Dell Vista box. 4 modern PC all of them, none over 3 years old and all run very well. Everything has worked well on Vista except when I found some issues with extreme slowness.
I found that Vista will boot quite slow if a shared network drive that it is permanently mapped to is unavailable. I had mapped to drives on the 3 non-Vista boxes and could transfer files fine but I never tried more than a GB of transfers. I found that when I powered down the other systems and only bring the Vista box up it took almost 5 minutes to boot which was not typical. I also found that once Vista did boot, it took up to 1/2 hour to open the My Computer icon so I could my drives. Yet when I powered the other 3 non-Vista systems up the My Computer icon opened instantly when I clicked it, which is typical on the XP boxes as well.
So I removed the permanently mapped drives on the Vista box from the non-Vista systems I had powered off. I then rebooted and Vista booted normally, yes still slower than XP, but it was normal for Vista. And once booted up, I could click on My Computer and it opened instantly as one would expect.
The lesson I learned, permanent network connections that are unavailable make Vista slow to a crawl in ways one would not ever expect. Perhaps some who are experiencing odd copying behavior may have a permanent network drive mapped that is unavailable. Check that out, maybe my experience is unique but I doubt it.
Cheers!