Sadly Windows Explorer isn't that great a shell and worse it is so
integrated into the OS you can never truly get rid of it or even turn
it completely off. It is always lurking in the background eating up
system resources.

What I do, and many may find it a better option is use a different
thumbnail generator/graphic player for viewing your photos and other
video files. I like XnView. It has a small footprint, is free, works
fine with Vista and it much faster. Best of all it rarely has trouble
opening any graphic file type and rarely if ever crashes. You don't
have to give up on Windows Explorer, they can both coexist without
problem. In fact I suggest you also get GOM Player and VLC Media
Player. They all have their own strengths and each gets along with the
other and Explorer. You may find you use XnView more though once you
try it for looking at thumbnails. ;-)

There are many different options as far as how you can set it up. I
prefer to have the preview pane at the bottom. Then as you click on
the thumbnails that are shown in the top window pane than something
like an animated GIF starts playing right away, ditto for videos in a
miniature window, all very simple, just click on the thumbnails to
walk through and play you're whole collection.