Disable Windows Native Zip support
If you have large or many zipfiles in a folder, windows seems to lock up when opening the folder containing the zipfiles. This is because Windows is "smart" and decides to pre-scan the zipfiles and display them as folders. Installing free zip tools like zipgenius will not change this behaviour, although you would expect that.
To unregister the Windows zipfile support service, use the following command (Start -> Run...): regsvr32 /u zipfldr
To enable the Windows zipfile support again (I can't imagine why), use the command: regsvr32 zipfldr
Source of this brilliant tip is dans blog, which I found after some googling ofcourse.