Vista - Working with files and folders is painful

When i try to work on files or folders, the Vista always makes the cursor
busy. It's always doing something. The green bar on the address bar is
always starting from the beginning and moves to the end whenever i try to do
something in the folder. And the mouse cursor is always busy. Even moving a
folder is a slow and hard task. I turned off indexing. But Vista always
tries to do something on the disk. Why is it so difficult to work on a file
or in a folder? What is it doing? I didn't understand it. If there's a way
to stop this or cancel that future that slows the operations, please show me
the way to cancel it.

You might want to take a look at a couple of 3rd party utilities.
For file management, FreeCommander

for file copy/move TeraCopy - the latest beta is best at least for 32 bit Vista. TeraCopy has a beta for 64 bit Vista but I don't know how reliable it is.

For quieting the HD I've been working on this since I bought my PC in April 2007!
They don't make it easy. But you need to check Scheduled Tasks and Services and find out which you need and which you don't and disable and log them(keep track of what you are doing so you can undo changes that don't work) as you go.

Another thing is Windows Media Player will want to index all your media files. google mobsync.exe if you don't use a laptop etc..

Check out this page for a start:

Windows Vista Services Explained

Also you might find if you have a "Media Center" type PC it does this even more
as it tries to catalog all the media files you have stored, even if you uninstall WMP.
You just have to keep with it. Once you have things the way you want I recommend you get LookInMyPC freeware to make a printout of the state of all
your services. That way if you have to reset to defaults you can go through the list
of services and set them all at once instead of trial and error all over again.

Also I would get some sort of image restore program like Paragon Drive Backup or one of the others so you can restore an unbootable system if you do something that hoses your machine when you change settings.