When Pro 5.0 first came out I had a client with a major performance problem. I attempted to compile just AR and did get it working but it did almost nothing to improve the general performance. Later we discovered the problem was the network and not SBT. With pro 5.0 as you may recall the exe was loaded locally. So my efforts really were wasted. In fact SBT's head of engineering told me it wasn't going to work (Lane Giles). SBT tested many configurations and found very little improvement from the way they were doing it. Most of the time it turns out that the network it the trouble. And that trouble is with the pipe coming out of the server (assumimg all the connections are good). When a user starts a report it often uses 40% of the available band width of a 100Mbit/FullDuplex NIC - that's at a client's that has data in the 5 Gig's range. So if the server has only a 100Mbit pipe - two users can use 80%. So you can see that the other users get short changed almost immediately. We solved the problem by change the server pipe to fiber. Now the speed of the HD is the limiting factor.
John