Why is Zoom Browser so stinkin' slow?

I'm using a brand new quad core 4gb RAM laptop and it's still taking several seconds to view each of the 20mb RAW files. They come up but then the delay is to get the completely loaded image. I just want to flip through all the pics from a shoot quickly to delete the ones that are obviously bad, then I import the rest to Lightroom.

Is there anything that loads these files faster? I know the files are on the bigger side at 20mb and that they're RAW and need to be converted but it doesn't seem like it should take that long.

That does sound slow -- my 14 meg 10MP files seem to load very quickly, although I'm not a ZoomBrowser user, so I just opened it to check.

Has it been working well previously? Is there any other software that seems to be running slowly? Is there a chance that something is running in the background? Just taking shots "in the dark" here. I get the idea, though, that ZoomBrowser is designed to be quick -- have you compared with, say, the DPP Quick Check for speed?

If you are only using the browser section of ZB it's not converting the RAWs, only displaying the embedded jpgs. It will only do a display conversion in the RIT plugin.
You could try DPP's Quick Check which also uses the embedded jpg or Breezebrowser from Breeze Systems has a rep for being fast. I do all my initial screening and sorting of RAWs in BB before sending them to LR but I can't compare it to ZB because many years ago I installed ZB for about 5 minutes out of curiosity and, saw that it had nothing I was interested in and deep-sixed it.

I'm also wondering if ZoomBrowser might have issues with some of the newer camera...?

At any rate, the DPP Quick Check tool should really be fine for this and has more options (and quick access to plenty of other stuff).