Another question on this subject: If you have more than one game going on using different screen names, does that slow things down? When I had just one village, things seemed faster, but I don't know if that is actually the case.

Before going in VV now, I unload everything I possibly can, I use System Mechanic to recover and defrag memory, and then start up VV. Things are still moving slowly with freezes and such, but it is better than when I was running my usual stuff along with VV.