Hi all,
Here is a new image viewer built on WIC for Vista and XP. The program can use buffering, parallel image loading and DirectX hardware acceleration when available so it's very quick on modern hardware.
It was designed for photographers, to ease the initial image review and selection (it can write Adobe XMP sidecars with rating/label/urgency and can embed XMP and Vista ratings in JPEG files) but offers no editing functions at all.
The product is commercial but there is a free edition.
http://www.fastpictureviewer.com (
download link, 1.12MB)