Load Dialog disk access slowdown on Windows 10

Solution 1:

Gorram son of a businessman.

It was the nonexistent floppy drive. No-one ever expects the drive they don't have!

My motherboard has a floppy controller on it, which apparently as a technology hails from the era where checking to see if anything is connected was considered a waste of clock cycles. Each and every time I ran System.IO.Directory.GetLogicalDrives(), it was waiting for the ghostly drive to timeout.

I opened up my BIOS and found a setting to disable the floppy altogether, which has caused the problem to completely evaporate. Gimp now loads flawlessly, too.

^{I'm such a fracking good detective.}

Solution 2:

FYI -- disabling Floppy Disk Drives > Floppy Disk Drive in Device Manager worked for me. I was too lazy to restart and fiddle around in BIOS.