Windows XP -- Slow copy & paste

[NivekC4]

Whenever I try to copy and paste a file from folder to folder, my computer seems to pause and gives me the hour glass for a couple seconds before you see it has copied the file, and then I can paste it into the new folder.

This has only started about a couple weeks now, and it's real annoying since copy & paste use to be instantaneous. Has anyone encountered this problem before and know a fix? Only thing I could find on Google was to go into the registry and clean out the Context Menu Handlers. I've actually done that and it's still slow

I appreciate any help.
-Kevin

<Edit> I may add that these are excessively large files I am copying ... happens with mp3's the size of 3mb.</Edit>

 

[LongTimePCUser]

I had a similar sounding problem. It turned out that I had recently installed McAfee Antivirus (enterprise edition) and it was very agressively scanning all files as they were written. I never had that problem with Norton Antivirus. The problem went away when I turned off scanning files written and left it to scan only files when read. I would have preferred to keep scanning written files but it was just too slow. Minutes instead of seconds.