I'm running Windows 2008 x64, with IIS and FastCGI. Any reason anyone can think of that php-cgi.exe would run at 100% for minutes at a time when doing things such as clicking the "edit" tab in the admin panel (that is, if the edit page loads before a timeout error)? My albums seem to load pretty slowly to, with the same process shooting up to near 100% before the thumbnails finish loading.

Just as an update, caching the thumbnails seems to have eased some of the congestion.

You might want to turn off the visible thumbselection option if you are not running Firefox. With that option set a thumbnail image is included with each image in the thumb selection drop-down list. If you have a lot of images that could take some time.