Here's a new screenie:
Click on the image to enlarge it.What I found interesting was that in watching the import run with Process Explorer open, I noticed a pattern. The import process would go along in fits and starts, much like someone else in this thread described above. It will hum along for 20-30 files or so, and then freeze on one of them for a long period of time. It would then count upwards painstakingly 1 file every 1-2 minutes or so for a while, then suddenly blaze through another group of 20-30 files.
What I noticed, was just as the "fast importing" ended and it got hung up on a certain file, I'd see the DCRaw.exe task show up in Process Explorer. It would only last a second or two and disappear, but the "file count" in MC's import progress dialog wouldn't increment for a very long time, and simultaneously I'd also see the network usage spike for a sustained period. In the screenshot above, the long period of 45-55% network utilization is during one of these periods.
When the "fast importing" periods are happening, the network utilization stays very low (at around 2-3%).
I should mention, it's entirely possible that there is a problem with leaky software on this machine, since it's my work's machine (and there's some software they require that I don't use but that's there anyway -- like a Citrix client). The machine itself works quite well though generally. Here are some stats:
Intel Pentium D 940 (Presler)
Intel D975XBX Motherboard (i975X with ICH7)
1 GB DDR2 at 333 MHz (PC2-5300 Micron RAM, 3:5 ratio, Timings: CAS 5.0, 5, 5, 15, 21)
GPU: nVidia 7800GTX 512MB (ForceWare 91.47)
Windows XP SP2
EDIT: Added some stuff about the machine.