AutoCAD Civil 3D

[#1]

You might benefit from working locally by using Vault to check out your projects locally and store them back on the server when you are done.  Invalid links, shortcuts, broken mapped drives, offline printers, digital signatures, and overall WAN latency can contribute to your slowness problem. 

[#2]

We are not setup for Vault. Just getting on a new server should do the trick, though.

As an example, when I tested a project with a pipe network on both the 2003 and 2008 servers, the results were pretty dramatic. Listing the pipes (31) in Toolspace on the 2003 server took 1 min. 45 sec. Sometimes it took much longer. On the 2008 server, it took 2 secs.