I know that this could look a dumb question, but here's my problem. I have a worker dialog that "hides" a backgroundworker, so in a worker thread I do my job, I report the progress in a standard way and then I show the results in my WPF program. The dialog contains a simply animated gif and a standard wpf progress bar, and when a progress is notified I set Value property. All lokks as usual and works well for any kind of job, like web service calls, db queries, background elaboration and so on. For my job we use also many "couplers", card readers that reads data from smart card, that are managed with native C code that access to serial port (so, I don't use .NET SerialPort object). I have some nunit tests and I read a sample card in 10 seconds, but using my actual program, under the backgroundworker and showing my worker dialog, I need 1.30 minutes to do the SAME job. I struggled into problem for days until I decide to remove the worker dialog, and without dialog I obtain the same performances of the tests! So I investigated, and It's not the dialog, not the animated gif, but the wpf progress bar! Simply the fact that a progress bar is shown (so, no animation, no Value set called, nothing of nothing) slows serialport communicatitons. Looks incredible? I've tested this behavior and it's exactly what happens.