searching is very slow in Explorer

We have a folder with hundreds of files of the same type (DWG). When we go to explorer and open that folder it seems that it takes a long time for xp to re-draw all the litte icons, causing the search to either stop or slow down considerably. This does not happen on windows 2k or 9x computers. I do not have the thumbnails engaged. The machines are all 2.4GHZ dells with 512 of RAM. Is there a way to force XP not to re-draw all the icons? what am I missing here?