Photoshop :: How Can I Speed Up PSCS3 (PS10.01) ?

with Photoshop CS3 on XP-Pro and would really like to learn if there is some why to get it to work as well as PSCS2 (9.0.2)?

Example: I open a white canvas 20x 30" @ 300ppi. On this I 'Place' 4 small websized (400x600px) images as 'Smart Objects' and then add a layer mask to each (a 154mb image when open). Even as I'm placing the 3d image PS10.0.1 is slowing to a crawl and the scratch file has already grown to 6.3GB. Add a few layer masks and the whole thing becomes unusable. PS freezes with "Not Responding" and then 20 or so seconds later it recovers with a scratch disk that's grown by another GB. Every time I move an image around on the canvas PS freezes again. FINALLY after about 5 minutes of poking at the thing the scratch file maxes out at 8.56GB and I can then do what I want with the image and CS3 starts to perform in an acceptable fashion. If I 'purge' the cache I'm right back to the staggered performance. Same image on my laptop behaves the same and scratch file grows to 9GB.

Same image in CS2 (PS9.0.2) opens immediately, performance is right there ready to go. I can do whatever I want, as fast as I wish, and PS9 just keeps up. The scratch file maxes out at around 1.5GB.

I'm running an Intel mobo with an E6600 Quad, 4GB RAM that I run with and without the 3/GB switch (via a boot menu). Main drive is a 10k Raptor and I have two 15k Atlas SCSI drives, one empty one dedicated as PS's scratch disk. History states is set to 10 and cache to 6. This is otherwise a very fast PC that pretty well matches Mac dual Xeon's performance in the Driver Heaven Photoshop benchmark test (I was curious <g>). So why is PS-CS3 so darn Pokey :-((

I really don't know where to start with fixing this as the same behaviour occurs on other computer's I've tried it on. I have not yet seen PSCS3 perform well on ANY PC I've tried it on. Does CS3 always create such HUGE scratch files compared to CS2? Is everyone just living with this sort of performance and accepting it as the price for getting the new features? Other posts here seem to point to a 'networked printer set as the default' issue. Did that, didn't help. And if that were so easy then it would seem like something begging for a small patch from Adobe to fix it. Lots of pros out there with networked printers..

I now shoot with both a D300 and D3 so I have to use BridgeCS3+ACR if I want to continue that preferred workflow. But processing in BridgeCS3 and then working in CS2 is frustrating. Except for very basic chores I'm finding PS10 to be unusable.

Is there anything I can pull out of PS10 to get it to be more lean and mean?