I've been working with Moodle for several years now, primarily as part of the SLOODLE project. However, one thing that has always been a source of frustration is how slow Moodle often seems on my local Windows Vista PC in work (sadly, I don't have the option of upgrading to Win7). As it turns out, the performance problem was entirely caused by where I had placed my "moodledata" folder, and there is any easy solution.