Dreamweaver8 too slow to use

In my new job I have some legacy websites to update as well as new projects to develop, which will ultimately replace the legacy sites. All our previous websites were written using ColdFusion6, so for me this meant a return to using Dreamweaver. Now I started my web career with Dreamweaver back when it was affectionately known as UltraDev and it was a good time for me. I am even the proud owner of a Macromedia Dreamweaver MX2004 Certification. So this was like welcoming back an old friend.

We're using DW8, and though I have tinkered around with CS3 at my previous job, I have to say that I'm quite disapointed with the performance. I'm not sure whether it is because the "local" site is on a network drive and there are just over 26,000 files in the biggest site. Yes I did just say twenty six thousand and they're mostly static, CF is just being used for includes and a bit of conditional logic on the pages. Opening DW can easily take over a minute and that's before it starts loading in the pages I left open last time. Changing between sites I can easily walk away and make a cup of tea and it still wont have finished checking for changes. All the while this is happening my computer is sluggish and its not just my computer that suffers the other 3 developers all notice the slow down and it seems to make our access to the network crawl. So when we're publishing its time for a chat and let it get on with its thing.

I wish I could stop there but even closing DW takes longer than anything else, again it is easily more than a minute. In comparision with Visual Studio 2008, which is my new favourite IDE, if VS2008 is a BMW 5 series this then DW8 is a Ford Focus with MOT failing emissions. It is so slow closing down that I can shut down all my other applications (FireFox, MSN, Outlook, IE7, Sql Developer and some other apps) before it gets as far as wiping the screen.

I don't remember it being this bad and I think it does a great job as a web page designer, its only 80MB or so as an installer compared to VisualStudio which needs a DVD. So why is it such a hog?