> The standard solution to this problem in OS/2 was to use a separate
> thread for each task. One thread drives most of the window, one thread
> reads in directory entries, and you could even dedicate a thread to
> updating the on screen directory listing. 

Another nice solution is to have the file type in the system catalogs.
This is what Apple did in HFS. The benefits is that there is no file at
all to open on the disk, the information is taken from the stat()
equivalent. The drawbak is that once you work on a non native fs, you
loose the benefits. This is a big drawback.

-- 
Emmanuel Dreyfus
manu@netbsd.org