Has anyone run into problems where the Visual Studio 2008 WinForms designer can sometimes be almost unusably slow in rendering controls? I have forms where I get the "gear" when clicking on a control to look at, say, properties and it sits there for several minutes.

This is WAY to slow, IMO.

Do you have a bunch of custom controls and user controls? This happens to me as well. The delay might happen when VS tries to build the toolbox from your code. I noticed that it is always much quicker when I'm working on a project that has few or no custom controls. Just a guess though...

Yes... we have both based upon Infragistics 2008 v1.

We also use Infragistics on many forms, and those are totally broke in the designer - but what bothers me most, is that even forms in the solution without3-rd partycontrols are un-usable. The big problem is that when you have a 5-minute change to do, and the designer croaks, the developer will go in and hand-code the change, which subsequenctly breaks the designer permanently. I am not looking for a fix, I really want to know if I am going about my UI implementation badly - or if 2Gb RAM is too little.

It's also apparently official (sorry I would search for a link, but I do have a day-job) that inheriting causes issues of it's own, but we are not inheriting in all of our forms either (something I think we should actually be doing more of hence discouraged from best-practice perhaps).

Speedwould be OK to live with for a time, but I would like to get an idea of how many people do use the designer sucessfully versus those that do not, especially onprojects with >200 forms. Since moving to WPF we are not gettingany better luck either for similar reason. Is it possible that plug-ins like version-control and Resharper, which are actually more vital than the designer are behind the slow performance and breaking? I will have to try turning the toolbox off and see if it helps a bit going forward.