LHA files

[Ilwrath]

Hello-
There's two problems you could be running into here, so I have a couple questions.

First off, how many files is "a sizable number"?  100? 1,000? 10,000?  

How are you opening the directory?  (Workbench, DirOPUS/DM, etc?)  If it's workbench you're using... It has to allocate the graphics for all the icons out of chip memory.  (And even though all the icons may be the same, each takes up a chunk of memory...  chip memory, if you don't have a graphics card.)

If you're using DirOPUS or something, that shouldn't be a problem, though.  But, it still has to keep all those file names in a buffer of some sort.  Try a directory caching program.  It should help in that case.  There is a good one on Aminet, but I forget it's name, as I haven't messed with my settings in a long time...

[Ilwrath]

Wow...  under 50 files shouldn't cause you any problems, one way, or another.  (The problems I was thinking of start with directories of over 200 files, or so...)  

Fastexec can't relocate everything to fast ram, as the computer can't function with all things in fast ram...  (Obviously, bitmapped images have to be in chip, etc...)  Also, as I understand it, fastexec is powerless against programs that just grab chipmem with less-than-compliant methods...  So perhaps that is what you're up against.

Are you running anything that tries to automatically act on .lha files?  Maybe some strange datatype or something in your startup?