How to import just a folder?

Question

When I try to import photos from a folder of my drive d:\, I have the "Navigator" on top, then "Folders". When I click on "Folders", I get a list of "Devices", then of "Files" as they are called, but in fact it's a list of drives, among them d:\.
Now I try in vain to get to the folders on d:\.
In fact, the program immediately starts to import files from another drive, since that's the one that's put above, on top, in that part "From x Copy to y", so this automatic importing creates chaos in the target (all the thumbs have that "ok" sign in the upper left, and I see the list building up in "My Own Files" (Destination pane).
All this when I really want to import photos from a folder ( ! ) of d:\.
Now when I click on the tab d:\, the program starts to import dozens of thousands of photos in d:\, which means I cannot just "open" d:\ and then select a folder in it, but my click on the d:\ tab starts the importing all over from d:\, most of them unwanted.
Now there is also a little arrow, at the left side of these tabs, so I just click the little arrow, in order to just "open" d:\, to select the folder. No chance, I always start importing by this.
I tried with options, with right click, with menu entries, with help file, with internet (2 hours), but I don't find any solution to this.
Just once, and I don't remember how I got there, I succeeded to topen the folder list of d:\, but I was unable to scroll the list, and my photo folder was below the list, meaning I would have needed to scroll the list in order to get to that folder, so I tried anew, and now I never even get to the list, let alone that folder displayed / in fact hidden below that scroll end, without my being able to scroll.
As said, there is no help for this in the help file. This is so awful. Could anybody help me with these problems? Is is not possible to first select the source, THEN trigger the import? How to select a folder, since clicking on those tabs imports the whole drive? How is it possible to get to those folders "hidden behind" the drives' buttons? And when I succeed in opening this list, how to scroll there?

Answer 1

Thank you, Jim, and dj_page, for trying so hard to really help me, I appreciate a lot! The resolution of all these problems lies in the following, very simple fact:
LR3 (perhaps later versions make the difference, but can't be installed on my system, I had to return version 4...) does NOT make the difference between usb sticks and camera cards!!!
So when there is a usb stick with photos on it connected, it automatically shows those in the middle pane, even when those photos are 23,000 photos and completely block any normal function in LR!
I deconnected 2 of my 3 usb sticks, on the third one just being 1 photo, and this is automatically displayed, and "of course", LR now reacts as expected, i.e. a single click on any drive just displays the folders of that drive, and a single click on any folder displays its subfolders - so it's entirely that behavior I had expected, and you both are expecting.
Having connected a usb stick with 23,000 photos means, they are all automatically displayed, which means 23,000 thumbs are created, and so with a rather slow computer, it's no wonder that "nothing goes" anymore.
In fact, I have those 23,000 photos on drive i: which is a partition on my drive d:, AND on my stick p:, and when I deconnect stick p:, drive d: is available in perfect shape, without any filling-up of the middle pane.
So, with LR3, you cannot have connected your usb stick = your backup when you run LR3, since it will only grey your hair then.
So, problem solved, but I am really exhausted by this, and I caused you lots of efforts, too. I'm really very thankful to both of you!
Two little questions:
- Does LR5 now make the difference between camera cards, vs. hdd and usb sticks, or is it technically impossible to make this differenciation?
- The setting "include subfolders" is available, by rightclick (now!!!), for folders, but not for drives, so it should NOT also mean "include any folder and subfolder", for a drive, but only works for subfolders, of folders? I once saw the setting elsewhere, on the screen, as you say, but I never found it again, on screen, just in the right-click menus of folders. How come?
Btw, now that the usb stick doesn't make choke LR anymore (since deconnected), I not only get to folders by single clicks on drives, but also by clicking on the "FROM" button (upper left), and then by navigating in the classic Windows dialog that appears then. (All this was impossible with LR busy with creating 23,000 thumbs from the stick.)
It goes without saying that from the web and the help, it is "known" that LR creates thumbs, automatically, for connected camera cards - but I didn't find hints to this same behavior for usb sticks... thinking NOW about it, it occurs to me that I should have had this idea before, of course. Re-reading my post above, I also see that I spoke of "import from d:" (which in fact I was trying to do), but I did not mention that I had connected some usb sticks, too (which are always connected to my pc).
Perhaps one other remark:
In LR3 at least, the middle pane does not have a caption, so at no time, I knew from WHERE all those photos came, from stick P: (mentioned on top, "FROM"), from drive i: (HDD), from drive d: (alternatively selected in left pane!), or even from drive c: (which filled up in the right pane!).
So this non-correspondence between "the drive visually selected" (other grey color than the other drives there) in the left pane, and the drive displayed on top, left me wandering what LR was doing, in the middle pane, so a caption for the middle pane would have shown me from WHERE it was filling it up. All the more so since a right-click on the thumbs there does NOT give any path indication! So there in incoherence between "selection on top" and "selection left", and no way to see which selection overrides the other - of course, I'm speaking here of a system put to a crawl... ;-)