Deleting files in Windows XP extremely slow

"Does the performance change based on your recycle bin being empty or full? Even at 1%, if you have a 500 GB drive that is still 5 gigabytes of files in your recycle bin, which can be a lot of files if they are typically pretty small files.

I find it works a lot better to remove files from the recycle bin based on how long they have been there, not size.

Anti-virus is another possibility. I have also seen other 3rd party tools that install themselves in place of the recycle bin. Check for that as well and try disabling them. If nothing else you could just start disabling all those applications running down in your system tray and see if that makes a difference.

If none of that works then get Process Explorer from SysInternals and see if you can tell what is going on when you delete."

There is a solution - I have deleted from the Recycle-Bin just 8 very big files totaling 1.5GB out of about 1.8GB total size of the Recycle-Bin, and then wall-la...deleting files is as fast as click - as I was used to before starting to encounter deleting files takes very long time.

"I've run into the problem when the network wasn't working correctly. In this case it was due to delayed network access. The fix was to disconnect the network drives until I found the one(s) that were causing the problems.

Also, Windows has problems with file access when there are more than 10,000 files in any one folder."

"Usually deleting files in the Recycle Bin helps. If it doesn't, see if there are still leftovers in

<drive>:\RECYCLER\<UserSID>\

A UserSID may look like S-1-5-21-2502600870-2247595359-1186002861-1024

Delete the files inside the <UserSID> folder(s), not the <UserSID> folder itself.

It happened to me once that there were still a lot of files in there even after I emptied the Recycle Bin. After emptying that folder deleting was instant again."

Just going this myself right now. I have not seen the word defrag mentioned yet so for future readers I throw that one out there. Chkdsk to see if there are issues and do a defrag if necessary / if it has been awhile since the last defrag.