I thought I'd make my first SuperUser question relatively simple, though it's the kind of question that may not get many responses as I'm not directly involved with the issue.

A colleague does his development in Windows XP running in Parallels on his Mac. We've just migrated our VSS repository to SVN, and we've gone with TortoiseSVN as our client of choice with the Ankhsvn plugin for Visual Studio.

On his XP instance, after installing TortoiseSVN, browsing through folders using Explorer is extremely slow; about 15 - 30 seconds before the contents of the next folder displays. It's the slowest when opening My Computer. Once he reaches a folder that contains the working content of an SVN project, Explorer behaves quickly again as expected. It seems that TortoiseSVN may be spending a bunch of time searching subfolders for stuff so it can do its icon-overlay thing, but that's just a guess.

I've used TortoiseSVN for years on both XP and Vista on far less powerful machines without any issues with Explorer, so I'm attributing the slowness to it being run in a VM, though that may not be the actual issue.

So has anyone encountered similar performance issues, and/or know of a fix? Keep in mind that any requests to make changes to his configuration will need to be communicated and thus my response time might be slow.

Thanks everyone!