On thing I’ve noticed is if I run Seti@home and VRDB starts up during my screensaver it runs VERY slow there is almost no drive activity.
How ever The Avast! software has a higher proiority then Seti@home and Seti@home barely touches the disk. But as soon as I quit Seti@home
and turn on the screensaver (by waiting for a minute which is when my screensave comes on) the disk light is at full activity and the file gets much bigger much faster then with Seti@home on.
Could these programs be in a conflict? ??? Hopefully this problems will be fixed. I haven’t tried to see if running Seti@home on a floppies makes a differnce. I come back with the results later. 
Update: running Seti@home on a disk (floppy) makes no differnce in the VRDB
Its just as slow. 
I dont know what is seti@home doing or what kind of software it is but avast! needs some cpu time to scan your files. So if mentioned software is taking too much of cpu time, scanning with avast! can be much slower.
Seti@home (http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu) is a project for analysing signals from universe.
The program runs at very low priority. Running seti@home from floppy makes no difference, the client doesn’t almost access your harddrive.
Maybe the generating of VRDB runs with same or lower priority ???
RAM problems? Try, RamBooster (http://ftp.pcworld.com/pub/new/utilities/system_resources_tune_up/Rambooster.zip) 8)
I’ve already got a ram cleaning. 
but thanks anyway. Thats not the problem I usally have 350-400 MBs free. (Like I say in my other post. http://www.avast.com/forum/index.php?board=2;action=display;threadid=806
I just think its a program glich on ones of the programs side.