Now here's a funny fing to file under the 'funniest things since mad 
Mick  McMad won the Maddest Man competition' folder.
After much pondering about what goes on in my VM when Morphic is in 
action, I found that changing the platform code attached to 
ioForceDisplayUpdate to do nothing made Morphic run 3-5 times faster. 
It's amazing - I know have snappy response menus, typing goes smoothly, 
drag-selecting is fine, all that stuff. So far I can only surmise that 
something about the prim implementation/usage was massively 
overpowering the graphics system. Right now though I'm just enjoying 
the new pleasures of a usable UI :-)

tim