Windows Picture & Fax Viewer quirk

Here's a weird one: It turns out that Windows Picture & Fax Viewer's performance becomes super crappy if you have a bad shortcut in the same folder as the picture you're viewing. I had uninstalled an app but had a shortcut lying around on my desktop when I realized that opening images there would cause my hard drive to thrash.

I think this comes from the part that pre-loads images to improve performance. Still, it shouldn't take too long to discover that a local link is invalid.