Stop Your Hard Drive From Thrashing

To reduce your hard drive thrashing and decrease the potential delay you might experience when you right-click to bring up a context menu or a dialog box and to avoid a permanent refresh of your Desktop icons, open Regedit and go to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\explorer

Look in the right hand pane for the "Max Cached Icons"entry.
Create it if not present: right-click in Regedit's right hand pane and select New, String Value. Name it "Max Cached Icons" (the spaces are required, but don't type the quotes).
The default value is 500, which means the maximum number of icons that are cached by the OS.
The information about all Win9x cached icons is held in the ShellIconCache file, located in your Windows folder. Every time you create a new Desktop/Start Menu folder/shortcut, this file is updated, until it reaches the (default) upper limit of 500 icons.
But you can increase this number to allow Windows to cache more icons, and to force it to stop accessing your disk(s) frequently, only to search for those "uncached" icons.
You need to restart your machine after this change, sometimes 2 or more times, until the new setting "catches on". According to a MSKB article, the maximum size allowed for "Max Cached Icons" is 2000, but on some systems it is possible to increase it above that (experiment to see if it works on yours).
Try also to delete a possibly corrupt ShellIconCache file after modifying this number, especially if you have deleted some of your shortcuts or changed their icons, because Win9x still keeps the info about deleted icons. :( Don't worry, it will be recreated next time you (re)start Windows. I deleted my ShellIconCache. I had a file of 1,673 Kbs and it took 2 restarts to have it recreate itself but I ended up with a 768 Kb file.

It is also recommended to edit your SYSTEM.INI file's [vcache] section to read (SYSTEM.INI is located in your Windows folder):

[vcache]
MinFileCache=2048
MaxFileCache=4096
ChunkSize=512

MEANING:
"MinFileCache"specifies the minimum amount of system memory allocated for caching files.
"MaxFileCache" specifies the maximum amount of system memory allocated for caching files.
"ChunkSize" specifies the size of each block of cache memory.
The above lines are useful on systems with at least 16 MB of RAM installed.
On systems with 8 MB or less, try these conservative System.ini [vcache] settings:

[vcache]
MinFileCache=1024
MaxFileCache=2048
ChunkSize=512

On machines with 32 MB or more, you may want to adjust the "MinFileCache" to 1/8 of your installed RAM, and "MaxFileCache" to 1/4. Some trial and error might be necessary, depending on your particular system configuration.
Create a new [vcache] section if it is not already present in your System.ini file.
Save your work, and then restart Windows for the changes to take effect.
And don't forget to BACKUP your files FIRST!
Here are some recommended "MinFileCache" and "MaxFileCache" values depending on your installed memory (note that the minimum and maximum cache values are NOT the same, which helps if you routinely perform tasks dealing with large files):

Memory (RAM) MinFileCache MaxFileCache

8 MB 1024 2048
16 MB 2048 4096
32 MB 4096 8192
64 MB 8192 16384
128 MB 16384 32768
256 MB 32768 65536
On systems with more than 256 MB RAM (384 MB and above), you may want to delete these settings from your system.ini altogether (if present), and let Win9x handle its own file cache sizes for optimal performance.

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