A user came to me complaining that it takes 10-20 second for Windows Picture and Fax Viewer to display a picture from a desktop on his Windows XP machine. During this time Picture Viewer freezes; at the same time some other opened applications including Windows Explorer hang as well.

A quick investigation revealed that issue was caused by number of broken shortcuts residing on his desktop. Some of them were pointing to non existing network locations. It seems that while Windows Picture and Fax Viewer is opening a file it also tries to read information about other files in the same folder. Deleting invalid shortcuts fixed the problem.

Windows XP SP3