Notes/Domino 6 and 7 Forum : R6 sooo very slow vs R5 in designer

I've been sitting here for 5 minutes now watching a simple view design supposedly save. I only changed an action button and the view is not open so the index doesn't have to rebuild right away. The cable modem lights are not flashing - what is Notes doing if it's not talking on the network?? Apart from wasting my time? R5 was not this bad. I've also noticed that R6 tries connects to many servers every time I try to open the designer, taking ages. Sometimes when I open a database design it talks to a bunch of completely unrelated servers, and even hung me up for a few minutes earlier today just closing a view design when I made no changes at all. I just got the lightning bolt, but zero network activity. Frustrating as hell, especially when I know it's doing dick all in the background. Every turn I make it has to talk to the server (or pretend to - are there trolls in my PC?), even when there's nothing to talk about. Does anyone else have this problem? My network connection is fast and I have no problems with any non-Notes apps and there is nothing wrong with my connection docs, etc, and is on multiple machines.
I also notice that if I leave my mail open and inactive for more than a couple of minutes, if I hit refresh afterwards it just goes into la la lightning bolt land again, refreshing forever, and I have to do a ctrl-break. Then it's fine and talks fast til the next pause in my work. Argh.