but unfortunately this problem wasn't the only one I was dealing with. Life took over after I posted this. In answer to your question, it happened in all modes.

The good news is I think I figured it out today and boy was it a bizarre one. Seems, after a reinstall of Photoshop 7, that app somehow took over being the default app and icon for image types but something went out of synch. Even if you went into the file types setup for the folder and insisted some other app become the default nothing changed.

I finally starting searching through my register looking for ".jpg" (since the majority of the pictures were of that type) and found that keys to that file type were set to "Photoshop.JPEGFile". I did a search on the internet for that key and found someone's post that exactly described my problem. Someone had replied that by changing that key to "jpegfile" that the problem would go away. Boy did it. Suddenly everything goes at normal speed again. The same basic thing was set for .bmp files and I found something to change those keys to as well.

Windows sucks. That's the bottom line.

Art