Question: Is anybody experiencing extreme slowness when using Visual Studio 2008? I have a fairly beefy machine so I don't think hardware is the issue, and I didn't have these issues with 2005. Basically everything that I do is slow, from opening a new project, to opening code, to saving files. All of my Windows Updates are up, I have VS2008 SP1 installed, and I even tried disabling the virus protection.

Answer: 
Try loading Visual Studio in safe mode to load the default environment with [/safemode](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/xee0c8y7(VS.80).aspx) switch.

You might also want to try some of the answers here:

[Visual Studio 2008 PAINFULLY SLOW!!](http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/vssetup/thread/bc778e26-9156-4924-a9ca-a57ef8ff6bcc/)
This seemed to fix my immediate issue (copied and pasted from the link provided by Gulzar):

As an update, I found an even better fix so you dont' have to lose any functionality in VS 2008. This also drastically improved performance (response time) for me in SQL server management Studio.

In Internet Explorer 7...

Tools->Internet Options->Advanced->Security Node->Uncheck 'Check for publisher's certificate revocation\*'

Once I did this, like magic, VS 2008 works great even with 'Enable the Visual Studio hosting process' checked and SQL Server Management Studio's response time was almost immediate.

It is a good day!

My theory is the corporate network I am in is blocking certain ports (out of my control), and thus certain 'behind the scenes' requests are timing out, causing the delays. 

* Robbie