As I think I mentioned, I can’t replicate the problem with a new catalog- only with the existing one Which has 35,000 photos.
I’m not doing anything unusual in the Organizer. After uploading photos to my hard drive, I might first use Faststone Image Viewer to delete obvious non-keepers. Afterwards, I’ll upload photos into the Organizer and then determine any others that should be deleted (from both the Catalog and the hard drive). Photos are tagged to keywords manually and some are assigned to albums
Photos that are edited will be added to the same version set as the original. In some cases, I will use stacks to “combine” different cropped files and/or raw files into a single “view” for browsing