Yes Chris, 803 was an improvement.
I can't think of any one piece which is much slower than another. Developing with BP (on my 1.2GB VMware Box) is sluggish as opposed to snappy. Deploying SmartObjects is pretty fast compared to process deployment, but just watching the Host Server console during a deploy kinda explain that.
The requirement BP has on resources (CPU + Memory) has grown beyond what my notebook can handle. So I have invested in a Dual Quad-core Xeon 64-bit Server with 16GB RAM for my BP development.
Regards
Deon