Using VS2008 with the latest patches. Compared to a co-worker with a lower-end machine and half as much memory, stepping through the code in VS2008 on my box is really slow. There is at least a perceptible 0.5 second delay for each line.
What can I do to speed this up?
Right click in your watch window. Is the "Show Threads In Source" option enabled? I accidentally enabled that somehow, and it slowed down debugging enough to be annoying.
Have you tried forcing a full rebuild? If you're using the edit-and-continue or minimal rebuild options, I think some metadata files can grow larger over time rather than being rebuild from scratch. You might also try deleting the NCB file for the solution.
This happened to one of my colleagues and cleaning the solution didn't work. He fixed it by deleting the source directory and getting a fresh checkout from subversion.
(which was lucky for him because he was this close to reinstalling VS)
So reading into that, I guess there was some obscure output file that was causing the slowdown.
You could try copying your solution and all your source files to a different directory, leaving behind all the bin and obj files, and seeing if that makes any difference.
If it still happens, create a brand new solution and see if it's still slower than your friend.
If so then a VS reinstall might be in order. And I feel your pain, that's at least 3hrs down the swanny.