I seem to get the "Loading" message a lot. Any Ideas?

Question

Here recently it seems that I am getting the "Loading" message a lot when I want to view an image. This is even true for the "fit" view. When I try a 1:1 view, it seems to take forever to load. And this is in the Library module. Also, my computer seems to be running in the background constantly when I have LR open. I am running a PC with Windows XP. I have 2GB of RAM and a Pentium 4 processor (3.0 Ghz.)
Also, I have the following options set in LR:
standard size preview 1440 pixels
discard 1:1 after 30 days
automatically write changes to XMP
Also, when I import, I check the "render standard sized previews."
Thanks for any input!
Pat

Answer 1

The 'Write stuff to XMP' setting is a bad one to use at any time, in any version. If you need XMP files, my suggestion is that you manually command a metadata export at the end of your session, and then just let the computer work on the export while you do something else that isn't Lightroom. Just don't let it run on auto.
The biggest speedup that you can do is to work with a NEW catalog whenever possible, specially if you are doing sorting. If you need to integrate it into a central catalog later, just import it later. My previews went from taking an average of 8 seconds when I used a 1.2 catalog to almost nothing in a fresh 1.3 catalog.
The 'Create Previews during import' in 1.3 seeems to be somewhat broken under it's new design. I just imported 650 photos into a NEW catalog, and viewing them one after the other right after the import was taking several seconds. I think that it has to do with the previews being built AFTER the import is finished. So either wait it out, or better yet, if you want to see the progress, tell it to rebuild the previews manually. After that you will be able to see previews with zero delay.
Don't render 1:1 previews unless you will be actually looking at them. If you are just doing the initial sorting of photos, and you can check for detail later, wait until you have thrown out your garbage before manually commanding a 1:1 preview build.
After a long 'develop' session, go back to Library and manually tell LR to render the previews again, since they don't get uupdated during the develop phase.