What The Hell Vista?!?!

Ok, anyone that might know Vista better than me, why the hell does it take so long to bring up any kind of directory listing in Vista?  Here are some examples:

I have to wait on Vista every time I have to browse the network to access my other computer; EVERY TIME – even if nothing has changed.

And why the f— does it take over 4 minutes to access a large directory on my external drive, and then times out and gives me an I/O error when it takes less than a tenth of a second on XP?

By far this is the most inefficient piece of crap operating system I have ever used.  Anyone that loves has to have some serious mental issues.  I can't even use my SD card reader in my laptop now due to some driver issue in Vista, and their fix doesn't fix it for me.

Anyone have and ideas that might help, especially when accessing directories, as I really need to, and I am on a short fuse right now.  I just don't feel like playing games with Vista right now, and there has to be some logical reason as to why I can't access my own files.