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Over the past few months I've experienced annoying sluggishness frequently, but intermittently and I'm seeking some possble reasons. Note, as I type this keypresses are being missed because its happening as I use NetSuf t write this post. Ths is typial but not as bad as it sometimes gets.
The problem seems t occur when VA has been running minimized for a while and then I switch to using RISC OS. Sometimes its s sluggish that its totally unusable. Restarting VA usually improves responsiveness but frequently not back to the level one would normally expect. The problem does not improve with time.
The Windows taskmanager shows CPU usage down at 1% to 5% with occasional short bursts at a higher % and no other resource-hungry apps are running (but they had been, for example Fiefox with lots of windows - and this may hold a clue). The PF Usage usually is quite high when the problem is noticeable (around 1GB) and this may be another clue. I'm wondering whether Windows is not managing swapping very well and somehow not giving VA a high enough priority. Sometimes there is a lot of disk activity associated with every minor IO operation which might indicate lots of swapping, but its not always the case. For example, thats not happening as I type now, yet key response is sluggish.
If I reboot Windows the problem goes away until I do something like running Firefox or IE with lots of windows open and then it occurs again. I've tried a "memory optimizer" that is supposed to improve perfrmance but it makes no difference.
Another problem which someimes seems to accompan the slggishness, but not always, is continuous auto-repeat key entry in RISC OS. For example, VA has been minimized for a while, I switch to using RISC OS and open an Edit window and its getting continuous Returns. I press Escape and it stops but shortly afterwards it starts again and on switching to Windows and back it starts again. It s only resoled by restartng VA.

Is anyone else seeing this sort of behaviour and able to offer any clues or methods of resolving the problem without rebooting Windows?

VirtualRPC will run as well as Windows will let it. This means that if VirtualRPC is sluggish, it's most likely because Windows is busy with other stuff.

Firstly (assuming this machine has at least 1Gb RAM for XP - 2GB for Vista) I would try disabling Virtual Memory (I have this off on all my machines). This change will require a re-start. Then see how things behave. The fact that you are running some memory hungry apps, with lots of memory hungry pages open before/whilst running VirtualRPC might well be the cause.

I also suggest clearing out all rubbish from the machine (something Like CCleaner) as well as clearing the registry of junk and de-fragging the harddisc.