In this case the hard drive speed is what you need to focus on. So starting up opening the task manager and waiting for all the disk usage to drop down and then opening the folder you still have no icons. It would be helpful to diagnose the issue if you noted how long you wait, disk activity at the time and weather they load or not. I would load with clean boot to lower startup programs to see if it helps
Hitting f5 refreshes the folder. If that works it means the have loaded.
You can have a dual xenon quardcore processor but it the drive is 5400rpm the processor doesn't matter.
Even if I wait for like 1 hour the arrow icons don't come up. It simply doesn't have anything to do with loading times. Also, the arrow icons should appear without even hitting F5.
It's a bug that came along with Windows 8.1. Problem is there's no other mod around here who's willing to try to reproduce the issue.