Finder icon previews slowing finder

I work with a lot of pdf files, and as finder shows pdf icons as a preview of the first page it can take a long time before the content of a folder stabilises itself, ie: updates all icons with a preview of its content.
Its particularly frustrating if you are renaming a file, as you have to wait for all the contents within the folder to finish updating otherwise it keeps skipping off the desired file.
Is there any way of getting the finder to just show the generic icon of a file, rather than the preview? It would speed up the system no end.

Thumbnails don't slow down the Finder. The problem is in the view style you are using. The bug where you loose your file rename session when the thumbnails draw is a known bug in List View that has been around for a couple OS releases, it has only been made more prominant with the addition of thumbnails in List View in Leopard.
The solution is either switch to Icon or Column View, or while in List View press Command-J and uncheck the "Show Icon Previews" checkbox. The click the "Use As Defaults" button.
Hope that helps.

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