Very Slow File Operations- Copying, Deleting

Introduction

I'm a retired telecom engineer whose retirement hobby is to photograph up-and-coming talent for their portfolios. I don't charge, but run it as a professional business. This computer problem has me nearly paralyzed.  It certainly looks like "amateur hour" in front of these models and parents. In the sticky "Tips" for this forum section Edgar says about information to provide when asking a question "The more the merrier." I hope that's the true spirit around here, because here comes a lot!

Summary:

I am running Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit in Classic mode. I've been seeing very slow file operations since making this PC my main computer earlier this week. My system specs are listed below my signature. In addition to a specific example of the problem below, here are some othe4r observations:

• Slow file transfer when copying image files from a CF Card over Firewire 800 MB/s (1394b) (see specs). It takes 30 sec to copy 150 files (730MB) to the D drive. In Safe Mode it takes 5 sec.
• Copying about 60 MB of "Web size files (4KB, 35KB) to a USB "thumb" drive takes over half an hour. 
• Interestingly the transfer rate is "lightening fast" between this PC and a PC I use as a NAS over 75" of Cat 5c cable at up to 50 MB/s. 
• I achieve over 200 MB/s backing up Outlook PST files from my C: drive to my Data drive.
• File transfer to an external USB-connected drive pokes along at 1.9 MB/s. A 50MB transfer takes over a half an hour.
• Copying or moving files between one instance3 of Windows Explorer to another often results in Windows Explorer freezing or vanishing altogether. Even copying or moving within the same instance can result in Windows Explorer disappearing.
• I just replaced the external drive with a WD My Book 3.0 2TB on USB 3.0. The transfer speed is averaging 14-17MB/s in normal mode and 52MB/s in safe mode.

Perhaps if we can nail down and correct the cause of one symptom it will fix the others.

A Specific, Repeatable Example of the Problem:

On my internal data drive (the Hitachi 2TB) when I copy 150 image files (about 730 mb) from one folder to another it takes approximately 27 seconds.  When I delete the 150 files from the destination folder it takes about 27 seconds.

Troubleshooting:

I followed steps outlined by Afzal TaherMicrosoft Support Moderator on Thursday, June 03, 2010 5:07 PM in this thread:

http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7files/thread/f1d8d485-a9c8-4ec9-ae31-27c8c26164a5?prof=required

Troubleshooting Steps:

1. When I boot in Safe Mode the copy takes 4.7 seconds and the delete takes less than a second.
2. When I boot after selecting Selective Startup in msconfig leaving Services normal and disabling all Startup items the original problem persists.
3. In msconfig I disabled all non-Microsoft Services and all Startup items then reboot and the original problem persists.

Diagnostics / Virus Scans:

Ran MalwareBytes

Ran Trend Micro Housecall

Hijack This report available- I don't know how to attach it to this post.

The top part of a Belarc Advisor report is available- I don't know how to attach it to this post.

Additional Information:

To the best of my knowledge all hardware drivers are up to date.

The 2TB hard drive is freshly defragmented and the recycle bin is empty

The BIOS was updated at the time of build in May 2010. Since then two updates have been issued.  Should I update? (ASUS recommends not updating the BIOS routinely.)

I am running Microsoft Security Essentials. Windows Defender is turned off.

My Request:

This is much more than I can get my arms around. I would appreciate suggestions of any further tests or diagnostics I can run to isolate this aggravating problem and specific things to solve piecemeal.

Thanks - Dave

System Specifications:

Build 9 May 2010

ASUS P7P55 Deluxe

Corsair CMX8GX3M4A1600C9 (4 sticks x 2GB)

ZOTAC ZT-98GES3M-FSL GeForce 9800 GT 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16

Drive0 (OS) OCZ SSD Vertex 2 OCZSSD2-2VTX50G 50GB

Drive1 (Data) HITACHI UltraStar A7K2000 0F10452 2TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s

Drive2 (Apps, pagefile, misc.) OCZ SSD Vertex 2 OCZSSD2-2VTX50G 50GB

Monitor NEC LCD2190 UXi LCD 'twist' tech.

Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit