I'm running 5 copies of WoW (from the same folder) on my 3GB Vista system (well, I have 4GB, but 32-bit Vista can only 3GB)

Everything runs smoothly most of the time, but I've noticed that whenever I near places likely to be occupied by other players I get a stuttering. Going somewhere like Stormwind (even with only 1 toon while the others wait outside) causes huge pauses, anywhere from 1 second to 20 seconds. I'm guessing it's something to do with loading all the textures for all the different items people wear.

As far as I can tell from the resource monitor, it appears to be a memory issue. I imagine we're hitting max memory so Vista is doing lots of swapping.

Does anyone have any tips to improve performance in populated areas?

Would Vista's ReadyBoost feature (using a memory stick for swap, instead of the hard disk) help? Any other ideas?