[Jete246]

Jete,
Actually you have my info a bit backwards. I am still using the networked mysql database, but switched to local thumbs folder, and the speed was as if everything was local. It is when the symlink thumbs are being used is when the slow downs happen. The slowdown is also present after I watch a movie, when it tries to load back the thumbs and fan art.

Also, that is confluence in the video (:

I do appreciate the thoughts as I need to get this licked or am going to have to go back to the old way of doing things, which is not very nerdy at all!

Oh yes, I understand that is your current issue. But because you mentioned this before:

I disabled symlink and went back to original thumbs and the speed was as fast as before MySQL was set up, so it is not MySQL causing the slow downs

Which led me to believe that before you setup the library with MySQL, you had two instances of XBMC running locally on two different machines, but had already shared the thumbnails over the network.

If that's the case, then the problem could be related to how MySQL interacts with the thumbs cache. That's what I was getting at.

Is that Confluence? You're must be running a nightly build then? Perhaps this is an issue with the nightly build. You could try using the latest stable version and see how that goes.