Why firefox has slow response when i 'm saving pictures to hard disk?

Question

I have windows 7 64 bit and Mozila firefox ver. 17.0.1. I have the following problem. When i try to save a picture from a site (right mouse click and save as) to the hard disk of my pc, the response of firefox is slow. It takes about 6 to 10 seconds. I thought it was a matter of file size but it proved that it was irrelevant, because it was happening to pictures from 10kb to 500kb. I did the following:
- clear history
- clear cache from firefox and the folder ''cache'' in my profile
- delete the files downloads.sqlite and localstore.rdf
- i changed the ''browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone'' and ''services.sync.prefs.sync.browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone'' to false
- clear the downloads window
- disable all add-ons
After all these, the problem still remained
Then i started firefox in safe mode (help --> Restart with Add-ons Disabled...). The problem still remained.
Then i disabled Microsoft security essentials (real time protection) and windows firewall. I do not have any other anti-virus or firewall on my pc. Nothing happened.
Then i created a new profile (reset firefox). Nothing happened. So, one last attempt was left to do. Reboot with safe mode. So i followed the following steps.
i ran msconfig and disabled ''Microsoft Security Client'' from start up tab and ''Microsoft Antimalware Service'' from services tab. So i did a safe mode boot with network support and windows firewall, disabled. Guess what. Nothing happened.
I noticed that when i was trying to save pictures, during the process, there was a significant hard disk activity (the led indicator of hard disk activity was lighting constantly) and firefox on the left upper corner, shown the message ''not responding'' for about 6 to 10 seconds. You understand that saving a picture of 19kb in 10 seconds is not normal.
Is this problem has to do with the cache? The hard disk is an SSD (solid state drive). Do you think it would be better to redirect cache to memory? (i have 6GB total RAM). This problem was also happening to previous versions of firefox, but i think that with this version, the problem is more frequent. It is not happening with every picture, but it happens with more than 65% of the pictures.
It also happens when loading a web page, but it might be a matter of a heavy web page that uses many resources of my system, during loading. The problem is the same. Constant hard disk activity and it takes time to load the web page. The problem with web page loading, is not as frequent as with saving pictures.
I think it is a matter of cache management. What is your opinion?
Thank you.

Answer 1

The cause to my problem was the jump lists, that Windows 7 introduced. There are two kinds of jump lists, automatic and custom. Automatic jump lists were causing the slow down of firefox through window explorer. Finally it was a problem of windows explorer and not firefox. Windows 7 introduced many new features that cause slow system performance. Anyway the solution to the problem is to follow the steps:
1. Open mycomputer and on the address bar paste the path: %AppData%\Microsoft\Windows\Recent\AutomaticDestinations
2. Press ctrl + a
3. press shift + delete and delete everything inside the folder
I think that the respective jump list of windows explorer is the one that starts with 1b4dd67f29cb1962, in case you don't want to delete every jump list in the folder. If you use firefox, download a file and then go to the above mentioned path and view files by date. The most recent file should be the correspondent with firefox.