I mentioned yesterday that VMware Server, which is still in beta, seemed particularly slow when accessing the (virtual) hard disk. However, I wondered if perhaps there was a compounding factor.
My VMware virtual disk (20 Gbytes) was 80% full, so I ran the VMware 'defragment' utility to see if that was the problem. Sure enough, while it's still slower than I want (and slower than I expect the release version to be), it's now a lot faster than it was.
Sometimes you need to dig that little bit deeper.