When you open Add or Remove Programs on a computer that is connected to one or more large hard disks, Add or Remove Programs seems to stop responding in Windows XP or in Windows Server 2003

You have a computer that is running Windows XP or Windows Server 2003. The computer is connected to one or more large hard disks. For example, the computer is connected to one or more 8-terabyte (TB) disks. The disks are local physical disks, or the disks reside on a storage area network (SAN). When you open the Add or Remove Programs item in Control Panel, Add or Remove Programs seems to stops responding. You receive the following message in Add or Remove Programs: This issue does not occur if the computer is not connected to large hard disks.

When you open Add or Remove Programs, Windows scans the files in the first level of the folders on all disks that connect to the computer. Windows performs this scan operation to retrieve the information about installed programs. Large hard disks usually contain many files and folders. Therefore, the scan operation takes a long time to finish.

This behavior is by design.