Jamie,
Have you allowed the raw cache to build completely for the folder you are using and what are the file sizes of the raw images?
Adding to the queue is instantaneous if the cache is built.
You can tell if the cache is building by looking at the information above the thumbnails where it give the progress and a yellow icon appears on the thumb if it is not built - see screen shots below.
You do have to be a little patient when opening a folder of raw images for the first time and once built, time for rebuilding individual images after adjustment is quite short, depending on image size and processor speed.
For reference, on my 3.6Ghz quad core PC, 29MB raw files (CR2) take about 5.5 secs per image to build the cache and 8MB CR2's take 1.6 secs. The processors have to work quite hard to do this.
Also check you preferences are set for quad core in the hyper processing options.
One more point; some filters take a little time to process depending on how many items are set in the filter.
Terry

I suggest you check what other processes are running while running QU in Task Manager: Ctrl-Alt-Del etc. In the Processes tab click the CPU column to get descending order and see what is using the CPU capacity.
This all sounds like a system problem that is affecting QU.
Terry

Thanks Terry,

I'll take a look at that, I didn't think of that, definitely not all running as it should.

Jamie

Hi Jamie,
Don't mean to butt in, but been following along and I wonder from what program you got the skewed /twisted images?
I know Qimage doesn't do that, so I have to ask where did you make those?

If you didn't make the distorted images intentionally, and you really don't know, then I would suggest that you try a brand new half dozen images that have not been run through an application before Qimage gets it.
From camera to Qimage.
Start a new folder (important) a NEW FOLDER, add new images and then see whether you are still slow.

Starting from this quote: I've just spent just under 30 mins adding just 8 4inch images to the queue. It was a mixture of NEF and jpgs and I needed to add a filter to each and various other tweaks.

You are adding 8 4 inch images to the queue! Are you saying the print is 4" x something, or you made the images presized to some ratio?
I looked at your screen shot. You seem to have, besides skewed images, rotated and cropped Blank images???

This tells me that you already had them in the queue and you did some work in the Page Editor to print crop and rotated them too.

OK here's my suggestion!!
Open this folder    C:\ProgramData\ddisoftware\Qimage\Crops    DELETE ALL THE FILES IN THAT FOLDER leaving an empty folder.
(Easy way to get to it is from within Qimage Ultimate, click on Utilities, Explore Application Data and click on the CROP folder to open.)
Delete the contents of that folder.

Then run your job. If that's still the same, then we might:

I think you might start from scratch, step by step, slowly, repeating what you do before you print.
Do that using fresh unadulterated images from the camera, and after we determined that there is no problem that way, then again step by step, repeat what you did to get skewed and distorted images as well as cropped and rotated blanks in the page editor

I have a gut feeling the deleting of the crop filters will work!
Give it a try; nothing to lose.
Fred

That is what is so perplexing!
I read and reread your posts. There's nothing to indicate that you did something wrong. So I ahd to ask if there was any chance the images were processed before.
All those white scissor icons indicate that every image has been print cropped. My thinking was perhaps there's a corrupted Crop file or files in that crop folder.

I even created prints at a similar size... (stick with inches, Terry is Metric Man) 

I saved it as a Job and recalled it as a Job, and could get nothing untoward.

Let's see what happens when you delete the Crops.

Fred

Thanks Mike,

That makes a lot of sense! The way it has been running does seem system related as suggested before but apart from q running around 99% cpu when building raw cache (as expected) the cpu is hardly being touched when doing basic stuff like adding to the queue etc. AND now I come to think of it, I plugged in a scanner just before I started noticing the problems. This is also a printer/fax, I didn't install any drivers for it as I just wanted to scan something quick, windows loaded its own drivers so I left it at that as it worked fine. I've ran off prints on the Epson since so its basic function is ok but as the new scanner/printer (Brother) is now in the printer list it's highly likely it is that causing the problems (fingers crossed).

Anyway, I'll reinstall the print drivers and report back later.

By the way, in all of my experiments to get this working I've figured out some much better ways of laying out the page, specifying 6 columns as well as the print size I'm after forces the correct orientation, takes out several steps. Did seem a bit daft having to flip each image after adding to the queue seeing as q was only doing what I'd selected it to do (compact mode).

Anyway, I'm feeling positive!

Thanks again everyone.

Jamie

Jamie,
Mike wont be around for a number of hours, but I am certain, that he wanted you to to uninstall and reinstall the driver for the Epson 7900.
That is the printer driver that he suspects is causing the delay.

Fred