No, my connection is not slow. I have a 1 Gig connection. What is weird is that while it can freeze when I search the folder containing the images, sometimes if I just scroll down and find it, it works like a charm.
As I said in my OP, most of the time I can do this with no problem whatsoever. It's one of those random occurring problems that drive us all crazy lol.
AMD Ryzen 5 5600X CPU. 16GB DDR4-3200MHz RGB RAM. 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD. GeForce RTX 3060 Ti 8GB GPU. Windows 10. ViewSonic & Samsung monitors.