RH6 Extremely Poor Peformance with Lage Webhelp Project

We recently upgraded to RH6, which has caused performance problems so severe that we literally cannot work with the project. Our problems are exclusively with our largest project -- 600+ html files, 500,000+ words, 35mb (only about 150 small gif images). We're not having any problems with our smaller help projects.

When we launch the large project, the CPU usage immediately hits 100% and stays there for the duration of the session. My longest session is currently 35 minutes, during which I was able to delete a folder, add another folder, and add 5 files to the system. The application took almost 8 minutes to close.

Because of the size of this project, it's always had performance issues on startup. Under X5, it took about five minutes before you could work freely, but then worked fine.

So far, three of us have experience the same peformance problems. We're all using identical Thinkpad t43 laptops with 2 gigs of memory and running XP Pro Service pack 2 with all of the security updates. Someone recommended temporarily disabling VirusScan, which didn't improve the situation at all.

So, two questions:

1. Have any of you experienced and been able to resolve serious performance issues of this sort?
2. What operations does RoboHelp peform when you open a project. It seems to verify folders (& links?), but I can't find any information about exactly what it does.

EDIT: We are not accessing the project over a network, so this cannot be the cause of our performance problems.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Roger Gerbig
Senior Technical Writer
Aprimo, Incorporated