Capture One V11 - very slow searching

I've been  using C1 v11 for a few years now and have noticed a problem with search speed.

My computer has 12GB of RAM and and Intel i5 cpu running Windows 11 (but problem has occurred just as often on previous Windows OS').

I have a folder in C1 that contains ~13k images. When I start C1 with that directory selected, it takes 10 minutes or so to load all my images (t shows my 13k images available in the field immediately to the left of the Search magnifying glass icon). Until all these image are fully loaded like this I cannot search the files (it only searches the subset of files loaded so far) and I cannot reliably select an image (as the image previews in the thumnbail browser window constantly update and scroll).

Once all images are loaded for the first time like this I can search this folder BUT this first search takes 10-15 minutes before it finds the image. Once I have done this search once, searches of this folder takes 15-30 seconds instead of many minutes.

I can see that C1 is using a lot of cpu (60% or so) and about 3GB of physical memory. When I ran the process monitor in Windows it looks as if C1 has every image in the folder open  or has opened every image in the folder (I don't know if the file handles shown are historic or currently open files).

C1's catalog is just a simple SQL database. C1 should be able to load the database into memory and search the version in memory to find the file(s) it needs to show when the user searches through the UI, and it shouldn't have to open every single file in the folder on disk in order to find what it needs. It acts as if its just ignoring the catalog and simply opening every single file in the folder, which is horribly inefficient and pointless.

Is there an explanation for this behavior and is there a something I can do to fix this problem so I don't spend the first half hour after opening C1 waiting for it to get its s#$# together and be useful?