I wish I had an answer - I have same situation. I have tried running the console DIRECTLY from the server by using the VMWare console connection so I'm working at the server desktop, I've tried from VISTA 64(my normal workstation) and from XP Pro 32bit SP3 and it's still slow. At times pages simply don't come up, and it's been crashing a lot lately.
So count me also looking for solution. FastCGI didn't really do anything to help.
I've uninstalled and reinstalled JAVA, no change, maybe worse at crashing.
In fact, the console on Vista and XP both crashed 2 times yesterday.