The VideoLAN Forums

When I open sound files I get a message like the following for each file:-
This slows down the opening of directories rather considerably and, anyway, I don't desperately want to find cover images, so how do I stop this?

This is kinda late! But in case you're still around (or if anyone else gets gets here from searching like I did after wondering why my VLC was DOSing last.fm every time I opened a folder), you can turn this off in:
...and disabling "Allow metadata network access"!

This seems to happen because of the "Fetch artwork using lua scripts" plugin, and I don't think you can disable individual plugins without outright moving them out of the VLC install folder, so this is the most straightforward way to do that.
Thought the responsible plugins live in "/usr/lib/vlc/lua/meta/art" in a lot of Linuxes if you wanted to move/mess around with those individually

If you wanted to try getting your hands dirty with some lua, instead of outright disabling them, the most recent uncompiled versions of those lua files live here!
After editing them, you don't even need to compile them; if you delete a .luac file in that folder and put the respective .lua file back in its place, it will happily load it instead without any extra work