Open and Save Dialogs Slow to Open and Populate

Roy,

I've got the same problem. I've been charting the slowness, i.e. the time until the app responds and opens the save dialog box, and most apps hover around 2 minutes of waiting.
My home network consists of a belkin n+ router (running only with the N radio, and WPA2 security), one ethernet-connected powerbook with a USB-connected hard disk (640GB+), and my MBP connecting by wireless. The USB HD is used as a Time Machine backup disk, and the backups are extremely slow, on the order of 2 GB's per hour at most.
That said, I called up Apple Tech Support and they had me flash my PRAM, restart the machine, and Reset Safari (since that was the app I called about). These efforts, unfortunately, did not fix the issue.
I will be passing on the fact that Tech Support's efforts did not solve the problem--maybe they'll get back to me on the issue. If so, I'll post it here.

For what it's worth, I'm having the identical problem.

Same problem for me as well. It seems to come and go but I don't have my Mac connected to a network, don't have removable media in computer, and only have one hard drive installed with it set to never spin down. The open/save dialog boxes sometimes take up to 5-10 seconds to open and beachball until they do open. I have SMCFanControl and iStatMenus running in the background and nothing else.

I'm having this problem, too, and it's driving me bonkers. In nearly any program -- NeoOffice, TextMate, whatever -- if I attempt to "save as," I get stuck with the spinning beachball of doom. NeoOffice can take as long as two minutes to recover and give me the save as dialog. If you find any solutions, I'd love to hear about them...

Should have added: I've got no Windows machines on my network. It's all Apple: Time Capsule, Airport Express. That's it.

Same deal here... all Macs, no Windows, even happens when other Macs are off-line.

I've got the same problem with opening and saving files. Oddly, it also happens when printing. So annoying, it can take upwards of 30 secs to get dialog box.

I am having the exact same issue on Snow Leopard on my Mac Pro. It takes approx. 30 seconds to open any open/save dialog window. I have a Time Capsule and no windows machines on my network. Strangely it happens only on my Mac Pro. My MacBook Pro and my girlfriend's Macbook, who are also in the same network and running Snow Leopard, work normally.

If anyone figures this problem out, please don't hesitate to post your solution!

Message was edited by: AvDe

After I upgraded my MacPro to 9GB memory, the problem seems to have gone away.

A costly solution! I actually did it for another reason.

Same problem with me. I'm on the latest Snow Leopard. It seems particularly slow doing File Save-As from Office applications. It also seems that when I reboot, the issues goes away, so it could be that it gets worse the longer the machine is up and running... adding memory is not an option for me, and I certainly don't hear any thrashing indicating pageout going on during the save-as. It just takes forever... like 30 seconds or more to pop up the modal panel prompting to save to a location.

Any chance it's due to mounted filesystems? I have Samba mount of a NAS.

Experiencing the same problem.

I've got the feeling it got worse after updating to 10.6.2.
My MacPro has 16GB of RAM, so I don't think upgrading that will cause it to go faster.

Same issue here. Started with 10.6, 10.6.2 no better. Rebuilt LaunchServices cache file according to: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10546409

and this has helped a bit. But still slooow. It seemed faster on my Quadra 950!

-m

I have the same issue since upgrading to SL. No better with 10.6.2 either. It is maddening and especially apparent in the MS Office 2008 apps, but happens with any application.

Before updating to Snow I thought to write how fast now open and save dialog appears.... now in Snow it is much more delaying than in Tiger, and in Tiger I was wondering:
Why is it such an affair to open a simple dialogbox?

_____ k.