Windows 7 - Problems copying/deleting/moving/renaming files

I know there has been some recent posts on other websites about this but the fixes outlined (such as downloading an "unlocker") dont seem to work. I've been dealing with a lot of .tif satellite imagery that I'm trying to move around.

After copying say 20GB from an external hard drive to the PC, which is successful maybe 1 in 3 times, I get these problems:

- Trying to rename the folder afterwards, with nothing else open, hangs
- Trying to copy other folders hangs at calculating
- Closing the explorer window and opening a new one hangs

Several restarts later and I'm maybe able to change the file name or copy things over, then the problems occur again.

Ive also booted into safe mode and Im actually getting the same problems as in a normal boot. I did the usual driver thing for external hard drive and checked updates but this seems to be a big problem with Windows 7. I cant keep shutting down because this is a workplace setting dependent on production. Any help would be appreciated.

Try going off for a cup of coffee when you start the rename and it appears hung. 20gb is probably a whole lot of files, and windows can get slow for a while when you have just added tons of files. It can take minutes.

Just a guess.

Maybe there's an issue with the drive or controller? I've never run into any win 7 specific issues with copying files to or from an external drive. What does your performance monitor look like when it's hanging? Are any resources overloaded? If you're using a special driver for the drive maybe there's a bug in that.

Thats the thing, its not just 1 drive on 1 computer causing the problem. Different drives (WD or verbatim etc) and different PC's do the same thing. Even after removing the drive and restarting the computer, logging in as admin I get the same wonky stuff. Performance does not suffer, and this is something that Ive seen other people talk about online. Task manager stuff doesn't seem out of the ordinary (services or tasks arent using up a lot of power, performance doesnt indicate anything major). We have a 3D lab upstairs from our office where we have individual workstations, all running Windows 7 on HP machines with 16GB RAM and essentially loaded to the tits (and no internet connection, just running off a server/local network). In my office I have an even faster PC that was custom built, again loaded to the tits and it does the same thing. I just assumed the performance would be better since Windows 7 is a good OS (I run it at home on my Lenovo laptop flawlessly).

I dont know what else to say, I'll do some digging on Monday, but it sucks to have to restart and play around with drivers, do general troubleshooting since I have way more important things to do.