Well I have continued to persevere with this issue and maybe it has just 
crept over time. It could also be that somehow Paradox has lost some 
cache characteristic it previously had.

For sure what is happening is that Paradox when using its built in F10 - 
F - O - Q Dialogue Box is then parsing the working directory (:work:) 
for all query files and this is taking quite a bit of time. Somewhere on 
average around 13 seconds with about 35,000 queries in the directory. 
Moving half of them somewhere else halves approx the time. The moving 
them elsewhere was to test whether there was perhaps a 32k limit to file 
numbers being processed causing issues.

Turning Windows10 indexing on, off, or search inside files makes little 
or no difference so Windows 10 Explorer has no problem. It deals with 
them almost instantly. Well under a second even with indexing turned off 
and this is on an early Samsung 850 EVO SSD with its inbuilt caching 
turned on.

Maybe the only solution is to write a new routine to get around this 
problem and cease to use the built in version. But that does not explain 
why the performance has dropped off a cliff.

Malware Bytes was always set to ignore that working directory and also 
ignore Paradox.exe. And disabling it starting up makes no difference. 
Ditto Windows Defender.

So not solved but I think it is the internal paradox process causing the 
problem.

And finally tried altering the Paradox Priority for the CPU and makes no 
difference. It is not a recent processor but it is an I7 running at 4.7 
GHZ so not slow even by today's standards.

Humm. I just had a completely wild thought. I recently went from 16Gb 
Ram (two sticks) to 32Gb Ram(two sticks) seems unlikely to have caused 
the issue but I will investigate.

On 19/03/2024 3:09 PM, Robert MacMillan wrote:
> Hi there.
>
> this is an odd one. My system has been rock solid for years but
> yesterday opening the query dialogue box has slowed down dramatically.
> So F10 - F - O - Q brings up the dialogue box. It now takes around 12
> seconds for the box to become responsive. It appears that Paradox is
> scanning all the files in the directory rather than being almost instant.
>
> Doing exactly the same thing for Tables or Libraries or anything else is
> as before. Almost instant.
>
> It is as though an index or lookup table has become corrupted.
>
> Any help would be appreciated.
>
> Thanks
>
> Robert