straying slightly...
With acdsee 7.0 I've tried excluding the root of each hard drive (and subfolders) from being thumbnailed but that doesn't work. You have to exclude the folders below the root or they disappear upon restart . In fact, being unable to switch the thumbnail/database thing off really is annoying. Despite that, I ponied up for the powerpack because I couldn't find anything better and I can force v7.0 to act almost (but not completely) like the classic version did. I have absolutely no use for the fotoslate app but the quick & dirty editor is good enough for my limited requirements, (cut, crop, clean).
Even with vast amounts of images I still prefer to [pgdn] through them all rather than view thumbnails. It's a preference that carries across all my windows usage. File managing is done with detailed view only and nary an (icon/picture) to be seen in any list/app.
So I give acdsee a bad mark for not giving you complete freedom with your browsing style.

I've been trying wsw, c&g and copernic tracker.
copernic was too limited for me and didn't last very long on the pc. wsw is lean and mean but overpriced (especially as I missed the discount). I didn't like the idea of paying extra for site archiving either.
I've saved the best 'til last, c&g v.3 beta most suits my needs. Seems to be quite fast too. v3b allows you to use regex for filtering changes which can't be bad. Also you can get the pro version for 39.95 http://secure.emetrix.com/order/product.asp?PID=3765587&DC=beta50 which was icing on the cake for me.
As far as I know this is the first beta but it's running really well.