I submitted my dilemma to Claude, and we came up with a PowerShell script to try. It did pre-cache files, but also loaded files into memory, inaccessible to other processes. I then had it restructure the attempt as a C# application, and that appears to be working. Not seeing any excessive handle usage; pre-selected files show up in RAMMap; and not having that memory usage issue that was in PowerShell.

I guess at this point, I could use some help testing it further to see if this is even something worth keeping around. I think it might be more useful on lower-mem systems, wherein cached files might get evicted more quickly from memory.