>>Update: re-Checked use graphics hardware accelerator if available and it seems even faster. I think it was the Automatically adjust visual experience that was the culprit.
>
>What about the "Enable rich client visual experience"? Should that be checked or not?

I'd guess that both options that are available here relate to WPF as used by the IDE.

'Enable rich client visual experience' will, if checked, use 'pretty' WPF styles (color gradients, animations etc).
'Use graphics accelerator' (sic) will allow WPF to handoff rendering to hardware if a suitable adaptor is available.

I just looked at what the 'automatic' settings were on two different machines here.
On the higher-end machine both options were selected when I chose 'Automatic'.
On the other machine only 'rich client' was selected.

I'm not sure where I should be looking for an improvement (or degradation) when manually overriding what VS decides.
Certainly turning off 'rich client' should improve performance in all cases - but I see no noticeable difference on my machines.
Equally, I'd suspect, turning on 'Use hardware if available' should be checked - if it is *not* checked in automatic mode I'd assume it thinks no suitable hardware is onboard.

One obvious reason to turn off 'rich client' is if you are accessing VS over TS or any RDT.
I also see that if 'Use hardware' is turned on VS still automatically reverts to software rendering in a RDT environment.

One last thing: annoyingly the descriptive text in the 'Visual Experience' group does not update until you save you changed settings and re-open the Options window.....