explorer: too many double-clicks required

Explorer does not update left-side pane with subfolders when they are there.
XP gets it right 90% of the time.
the + in front of the folder should appear immediately without clicking.

Most of the time I must double click and double-click on folders in order to go down the tree. this just seems wrong. Maybe in this case we can do better than XP.

somnething in it is not walking the directory tree correctly. If you need directory tree walking code, I can supply it, it's GPL'd win32.
the MD5 code is copyrighted by someone else, but
http://jesusnjim.com/code/zapdupes.html
The function you might want is addTreeToList(). There is some sort of weirdness in win32 that doesn't allow you to do recursion directly after discovering a directory. you must first get all the directories you find into a list, process your files, and then process your directories. or maybe process your directorties and then process your files, but not interspersed.
If you don't, you get the same directory over and over again in a loop. weird. This is with XP and 2000.

In your case, all that is probably needed is a just-what's-down-one-dir-below directory walk.