Time to load and build thumbs for "Lightning Cache": 9 mins 41 secs which averages 6.25 secs per image.
If you mean that is to build thumbs and create cache, then it is quite good compared to the test I did. Note it is 2 operations, QU tells you the progress in the bar below the menus that give the screen resolution and number of images in the folder.
When building thumbs for full sized TIFFs the process takes significantly longer (unmeasured), but then the file size averages 117 Mb.
Does this sound about right?
No!
I created some tiffs (110MB each) from the nine D 800 NEF samples I had down loaded; the medium & best quality thumbs build very quickly, too quick to time so less than 0.5 seconds each. Thumb creation is always significantly faster than cache creation.
The image editor part of the software does not like my NEF files; if I double click on a thumb I either get an "image read error" or a blank screen
I have no problem here with editing the NEF files.
Does this mean that DCRaw has not yet been updated for the Nikon D800
I just checked the camera list on the web site and the D800 is not listed, the D700 is. All seems ok. here with the D800 files, maybe the raw format was not changed.
Are you pre-processing your NEF files in Nikon software? That could be causing these problems.
Terry