It seems to be related to user permission context. If you run the main EXE as Administrator, it will not happen. But, even if you are an administrator and run Picasa by opening direclty an image file, the problem persists. Or at least, this happens to me and many others, it seems.


Indeed, it is fast. My life is almost entirely JPEG. However, I am trying to play with RAW, just for fun, in the future. If I had to spend money on some program, I'd like it to work with RAW. Now, Picasa is free, so ok. Lightroom is probably the best in dealing with RAW, I am told here and elsewhere. ACDSee does deal with RAW, but would not know how well.
In any case, at least currently, RAW is not primarily important.
My collection is entirely on a network drive, and I am planning to keep it like that in the forseable future, as it is being accessed by two laptops, my (new/fast) machine, and possibly, at some point, by an HTPC which I will be installing in my living room.


I do have a new and very fast machine, SSD based, so Lightroom opens fairly fast, fortunately. But, picasa is faster, in any case. ACDSee is just as fast as Picasa when used as a simple image viewer. When browsing through the image collection, it seems a bit faster than lightroom but definitely slower than Picasa.

ACDSee is looking really interesting. It is extremely powerful, and while not as feature rich as Lightroom, it can definitely compete with it in terms of photo collection management and organization. It beats Lightroom as a viewer, and as a viewer is more feature rich and versatile than Picasa.
I would be leaning towards ACDSee if it wasn't that I'd like some more power in reading Exif and similar data out of my pictures.
Indeed, you can associate keywords to any picture and then search for it. It saves searches so to create smart collections like Lightroom. Logic operators for searches seem to me just as good as Lightroom ones.

I'll keep playing...