Speeding up the BizTalk Administrator MMC

I reached a patience limit when the BizTalk administrator took over 2 minutes from launch to showing me my application resources on my (rather slow) VM. I could not remember this ever taking that much time. Of course, BTA console never was a real fastloader, but this was getting excessive.

When I asked a co-worker to logon to the same machine and try the same actions, I was astonished see him do the same job on the same machine in less than 30 seconds. Clearly it was user, and thus, profile related.

I created a clean profile for myself to test this and was proven right. It took less than 30 seconds to get the app running and the resources loaded.

I then started to replace original content from my old profile and tested until I, again, reached a 2 minute+ loading time. Problem recreated, cause found.

It appears there is a settings file that controls, amongst others, the window and grid layout of the management console. Over time this file has grown in size from a mere 2kb default to over 600kb. Loading this file seemed to take too much resources and caused a delay that went to 2 minutes.

I simply deleted the file and things went back to normal. Here is the guilty party:
Microsoft.BizTalk.Administration.SnapIn.dll.config

You can find it in C:\Documents and Settings\-your account here-\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft Corporation\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006\