Why does reading cookies take such a long time, and how can I speed it up?

If reading your cookies takes a long time, the most likely problem is that the size of your Cache is too large. Cookies Explorer goes through all the files in your Cache, and picks out those which are cookies. If your Cache is very large, this takes a long time.

To reduce the size of your Cache, in Internet Explorer go to Tools, Internet Options, Settings and set the Amount of disk space to use to 20 MB or so. This should speed up Cookies Explorer dramatically.