Gnucash very slow after importing 13 yrs data from Quickbooks

[matthew-gnucash at newtoncomputing.co.uk]

Hi,

I've been running our church accounts for the last year or so.
They have been done in quickbooks (2001) for a long time.  I need
to change to newer software, as I've found out that the previous
accountant installed an illegal copy, and I would much prefer to
use Gnucash (which we use very successfully for our home
accounts) rather than have to pay for a newer quickbooks again...
especially as the latest reviews indicate it's full of bugs!

As there didn't seem to be any way to get the data out of QB, I
wrote a perl converter that takes a few reports and converts them
into a gnucash XML file. This works fine, and I've got all 13
years worth of accounts transferred fairly easily.

The problem is that Gnucash is just so unbearably slow. Whereas
QB will zip along quite happily (in a virtual machine, too, on my
new Athlon 64 X2 system), Gnucash is just not usable. It takes a
minute or so to start up, and the entire interface is slow. I'm
running Gnucash 2.2.6 in Ubuntu 8.10.

Is this a fundamental issue with Gnucash not being able to handle
large amounts of data (around 7300 transactions, 167 accounts,
10Mb uncompressed data file), or am I doing something wrong? I
guess archiving transactions off may be one way to fix it, but
I'd prefer to keep everything in one file if possible to enable
historical comparative reports, especially if QB has no problems.

I really don't want to pay for QB again, but others are telling
me that we should just do it because it's easier - this is a last
ditch attempt to see if there is anything I can do!

Thanks for any advice anyone can give!

Cheers,

-- 
Matthew