The IDE is much slower than previous. Same was true for VB4 when it came out - compared to VB3 it was a DOG!
I used to run a PIII 700 with 256meg RAM for VS 2002 (1.0) and some large apps took awhile to load (lots of DLLs, lots of webservice calls, lots of validation, etc. etc. etc.). Some performance testing fixed some programming problems, the rest were all gone when we went to Release mode.
Before jumping to any conclusions, compile your app in Release mode and try it out on a typical end-user machine to see what theyll experience. The Debug mode inside of Visual Studio is a great tool for debugging, not so good for performance.
-Nerseus