Well I'm sorry, but Gnome and Xfce use exactly the same piece of code from the gtk toolkit, so there is nothing Xfce specific here and if you're sure Gnome and Xfce use the same icon theme (also from the same location), there is nothing you can do about this. Updating your icon cache might help (gtk-update-icon-cache -f -t <dir>), but that's it.

Oh, well, too bad.

I'm going to reinstall the xubuntu-dekstop package to see if that works.

Thanks for the reply

In which application? Because Xfce uses the default file dialog from Gtk, just like Gnome. So there can be no difference in the speed. I've see this before with difference icon themes, so make sure you use the same icon in Gnome and Xfce (svg themes are slower then png ones).

Nope, they're using the same theme (Gion).

It happens in every app I touch.

I just started using Xfce, and I gotta say I LOVE it, but there's one annoyance that's keeping me from switching from GNOME.

When I try to open an image, that's in a folder with more images, using the Open File dialog, it lags badly. In a folder with about 100 images, the dialog freezes for about 5-10 seconds.

Is there anyway to fix this?

I don't think it's my specs, if that's what you're going to say (Celeron D @ 2.66Ghz, 512MB RAM, etc.).