I feel your pain.

The best (free) advice I can give you is, before you close poser, collapse all the library folders to the top level. That way, when you open poser again, I'll finish loading a little quicker. However, when you expand a library again, it'll read through it, building folder counts. Just wait for it to finish then go about your business. It'll still be a bit of a chore to work with at first.

The best (non-free) advice I can give you is to grab a copy of D3D's XL Library script. It's not a perfect solution (you can't undo anything you add from the library with it, you'll have to manually delete) but it's a hell of a lot faster than poser's library.

What I'd like to know is; is it really necessary to count folder items? Does knowing how many things are in a particular folder increase poser's usefulness in any substantial way? Is there some technical reason for that? If so, can't the reading of folder contents be delayed until the folder is accessed?

I recall bagginsbill mentioning a proposed change in the library function along the lines of storing library contents in a database, that would greatly increase library performance, but that sounds like it mike take a while to materialize. Here's to hoping for changes for the better in SR3.