The SQL Server database related functionality is slow, like adding a new database (understandable to have some delay), configuring a dataset and designing table structure.

In fact in Visual Studio 11 Beta the table designer doesn't even work.
I get this loading screen (Picture 1) which eventually turns into this error message (Picture 2)

The Windows Forms designer is generally very responsive. However when designing a form that uses a background image, moving controls (especially those with transparent backcolour is extremely slow! Please fix this

Each new version of Visual Studio brings a slower and more bloated search function. The Find results window is never updated as the search is in progress and only displays the results once the search is complete. For a big project a slow search is bad enough but if the results are not displayed as it progress's your left making coffee .

because of the #include methodology, the c++ projects compiling is too slow.

why not just use as less as possible pass of compiling, how about 1 pass ?
If we can meet some presumptions,such as limiting use of macro, can we use 1 pass compiling through setting special attribute, setting option or some other mechanism .

When going TDD there is a lot of waiting on compiling before my tests runs.
Would be nice with a feature which made compiling a lot faster when only a few(1-2) files are changed.

Resharper is probably the most complex and most helpfull VS addin. It drammatically affects VS performance, so, it will be great if both teams will work close to make overall experience much better. NOTE: Rehsrper consumes huge amount of resources as well.

Having a default dark colour theme on Visual Studio 11 is great. The theme, however, hasn't been used consistently across all the different designers. The forms designer, data context editor, XAML visual editor and others have a light background regardless of the active theme.

If the dark colour theme has been selected, use a dark background in all the designers and dialog windows.

Loading PDBs is incredibly slow especially when fetching from a remote symbol server. It should be possible to thread loading of the symbol files for all of the load time DLLs (i.e. those loaded before the first instruction executes). It would also be great when debugging minidumps (since all of the loaded DLLs are known ahead of time)

We have a project which consists of 3000+ C++ files, and the updating of "pending chekins" tab is extremely slow when loading project. (Integration with Surround SCM, although it was slow on Visual Sourcesafe, too). Worse than that, the updating is done in 10 file chunks, and the whole IDE freezes & unlocks repetadly (unusable) until it is completed (which takes around 5 mins). Faster computers do not help. At least doing it on a separate thread would solve the issue...

Make it easier to see which app pools belong to which IE process ID

With a lot of extensions installed, the source code editor can really slow down on some older systems. Scrolling isn't smooth, and typed text can have big delays in showing up.

As go to definition/declaration and find all reference can take sometime very long time and hanging VS2010 for minutes even when finding nothing.
It will be lovely to be able to say stop seaching I'll open the file myself.

Application startup without any solution/project should be instantaneous (less than 1 second)
Application shutdown should not exceed 100ms for each open project and should show a progress bar.

In the solution explorer that "view class diagram" is right next to the "copy web site" button. And it gets accidently clicked from time to time, depending on the size of the solution we sit and wait until the diagram is built before we can cancel it and go do what we intended.

By putting a "Are you sure you want a diagram" dialog, we can intercept it

Running unit tests using MSTest is very slow (when compared to alternative farameworks like NUnit). Whilst I love the integration with TFS, code coverage and the like at times even a small test project takes so long to run that it seriously disrupts your "flow".

Building currently completely blocks the UI, and no progress is shown. Just showing a responsive, non-blocking UI windows which shows progress and has a working cancel button would be a great addition.