On a somwhat similar note as Black Xero, when you double-click these items does your HDD light flash for a long time before the window pops up? If so, try defragmenting your HDD. Even if you use NTFS after a while it will suffer a performance hit if you don't defragment it occassionally. Also, you could run scandisk to check for bad sectors. Are you running low on memory by chance? Maybe some system info would help us try and narrow the problem down.
