Is there any way to speed up files deletion? I process home video and convert it to dvd format and then burn it. After burning the dvd, I delete the large vob files. This takes a very long time. Is there any setting to speed this up? It doesn't take that long in XP.

which build of Vista are you using?

I am using RTM.

disable AV if you have one installed, and go into windows defnder, options, turn off constant file scanning

now try

yep, like bledd said.

Another thing you can also do in addition to what bledd provided is to turn off indexing temporarly.

Is there heavy HDD activity during this?

I have defender disabled and indexing shutdown. There is no other drive activity. Here is a little more information. It seems happen almost explicitly with avi, vob, or mpg files.

That's probably the explorer multimedia handler who is trying to identify, get infos or create thumbnails for videos.

Any way to disable that? I remember that there was a problem in xp when you deleted and avi and there was a registry key to delete to fix that.

Unless they redesigned the file association mechanism completely, it should still be much the same method -

look under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.avi and find the default value in the right pane.

Scroll down until you find that default value (most likely 'avifile'). Open it, and under the shellex subkey, then PropertySheetHandlers, ContextMenuHandlers etc. subkeys should be the GUIDs of the appropriate handlers. Copy those down just in case, then delete them to disable.