Mac OS slow performance after bootcamp installation

Question

So, I've been searching around here and on other forums, but I haven't found a solution yet to this problem and wanted to see if others knew of it. The problem is that the performance on Mac OS seems to have degraded when I have bootcamp (with WIndows 7, 64bit) installed. I've gone through uninstalling and reinstalling bootcamp a couple of times now and the result always seems to be the same, Mac OS is much slower... although I should note that the Windows side of things seem unaffected, and I'd say that (gasp) WIndows is running more smoothly that the Mac OS on m machine. Pretty **** annoying.
Some symptoms:
- Slow boot time AFTER I log in. The loading of the desktop and apps seems to take forever, when prior to bootcamp they'd all pop-up in maybe 10 seconds max. Note: this is not the general boot-time from OFF to the login screen... that's fine.
- Loading applications (safari, terminal, etc) all seem to take forever to load. For instance, safari may take 30-60 seconds to load and show my home page. Before bootcamp, this would take a few seconds.
- Once in Safari, the load time from page to page seems slow and jerky. Say I load engadget.com, or something equally image/content heavy, it seems like the whole page has to load before I can even start to scroll. Even then, scroll seems 'jerky' and not so smooth. Again, before bootcamp, this wasn't a problem.
I've gone through a bunch of stuff to try and fix this, but nothing so far has helped. Here's what I've done so far:
- repaired permissions
- used disk utility to verify/repair any problems (it didn't find any problems, btw)
- reset PRAM
- rebuilt spotlight index
- disabled spotlight indexing of the BOOTCAMP by placing a file called '.metadataneverindex' in the root directory on that partition. This interestingly helped speed up the the post-login boot-time, but application loading and browser performance is still pretty bad.
Anyone else have these issues and figured out what's going on? An IT guy at my job told me to stay away from bootcamp 'because 'it'll slow down your machine', so I don't think this is an isolated occurrence.
From what I've read all over the place, I shouldn't be taking a performance hit on the Mac OS side of things for installing bootcamp. Any thoughts tips you could provide would be helpful.
*I might use Parallels or some other VM down the line, but I don't want to run Windows 7 solely in a VM. Yes, I HAVE tried installing Parallels with Windows 7 and it didn't slow anything down, but due to the nature of my work, I want to be able to boot to Windows directly without having any overhead. (this is small percentage of what I'd be doing with the Mac, but enough that I wanna get this bootcamp install working)

Answer 1

Sorry, Macbook Pro 13" 2.4 Ghz... pretty much a stock 13" new MBP. I'm running bootcamp 3.0.2.
I should also note that I was having this issue last week and decided to reinstall everything and start from scratch just to see if that helped. It's a new-ish Mac, so clearing everything out wasn't that big of a deal... other than taking the time to do it. I didn't use a time machine backup as I wanted to reset everything.
So, I think I've figured this out after fiddling with the user accounts per your suggestion. I had set up my Mac so that my general-use account was 'standard' with a separate admin account for installing stuff.(more secure) This was different from what I had setup last week where I had one account that was setup as the admin. (less secure)
I added a new user, 'test' as a standard account. I restarted into 'test' and still had an issue. I quick-switched over to my admin account for something and immediately noticed that everything speed up. Hmmm...
I changed my regular account back to admin and that restored the performance on my mac to its pre-bootcamp state. (happy!) I'll need to play around with this more, but it seems that the two things I did to fix this were:
1) Add the file to the bootcamp partition to exclude it from spotlight
2) Login as an admin account
I haven't had a chance to see if setting my account back to a standard account will in fact cause the performance to drop. I also then need to test with removing that file from BOOTCAMP to exclude it from spotlight. Right now, I think I have more correlation than causation, but at least it IS working well again.
I'll update later today. Hopefully I'm not going to have to leave my main account as the admin.
*ALSO, I tested out configuring Mac OSX to immediately unmount the bootcamp partition at login, and that did help with performance, but kind of made using Parallels a PITA as I had to then go and manually mount that partition when I wanted to get into Windows through parallels. It worked, but it was a janky work-around. I have since dropped that configuration and now just let BOOTCAMP mount.