Apparently, nobody has a guess as to what's wrong with my setup. I surely can't figure it out.
PM just crashed again, when opened a folder across the network on an XP machine and told it to select the files color coded as winners. It just froze and I had to close it with task manager.
Nikon View, which isn't Vista compatible, has issues as well, but not as severe as PM.
Seems like it's a Vista issue, somehow not handling the files with these 2 programs as it does with others, such as the explorer file manager or with Magellan Explorer, which is another file manager.
Forgot another point. PM doesn't always open the last folder for me. For example, I prefer to browse the files across the network, select the ones that I want to edit and transfer them to my main machine, using PM. When it works, I close the network folder in PM and leave it set at one of the local folders on my main machine when I close it. But, when I start PM. it frequently will open the last used network folder and takes several minutes to open, because of that. It's really frustrating...