Thomas,
For large projects that are very slow to open because of VSS I'll do a SaveAs on the project to a new one and clear the VSS information out of the PJX so that I can work faster. Then I only use the VSS project to check out/in the files.
>We make them read/write locally to keep the SSafe version clean from "personal stuff" and only including pure app/exe generation related files. But the local project might include test scripts, data files and so on. Even so, sometimes the SSafe project is updated to a version not appropriate. For myself I have started a separate project for all those only development-related files and keep the "project project" parallell to SSafe. Perhaps I should give the component gallery a third look...