I've been having this problem with extremely slow browsing in ArcGIS10 when trying to load data. I thought I had come across a solution when I found a posting for the Raster Data Format Patch.
Unfortunately, adding this patch did not improve the browsing speed.
This is only a problem on a workstation that I use for stereo visualization with the Stereo Analyst extension. It wasn't a problem for ArcGIS 9.3 with Stereo Analyst, but since upgrading to ArcGIS 10 several months ago, this workstation is practically unusable.
I've contacted ERDAS support regarding this problem (the developer for Stereo Analyst). They have suggested the problem lies with a switch from ERDAS RDO (Raster Data Objects) to GDAL RDO with the ArcGIS 10 release. At this point, I'm not sure what I can do other than revert back to ArcGIS 9.3.
For anyone who reads this, I ultimately just dumped StereoAnalyst and switched to Summit Evolution Lite from DAT/EM. It has been working much better for me. I'm about to import projects covering 10,000 square miles and thousands of stereo images and still remains quite responsive.
