(general reply) you people are getting a bit ahead of yourselves. As Collective said, you'd have to do a test with a fixed number and repeat it a fair number of times, since any subsequent $findfile()'s are much faster due to caching (Windows, not mirc). I did some testing too and found absolutely no performance difference in $findfile() between 6.16 and 6.17.
As for Unicode having to do anythign with the reported slow-downs (the real ones, like /timers or, for some people, window switching and/or text display), I don't think anybody has (or can supply) any evidence that support this.
