I advise you to use “top” in a terminal, as root, to get some reliable info.

Concerning your performance problem, you should not swap within the virtual machine with such an impressive of allocated memory.

How much physical memory do you have ? Maybe, the problem is that your machine lacks of memory and makes your Ubuntu swapping…

To boost performance, I use the following settings :

(1) in the options of VMWare, I deactivate “taking snapshots in the background” and, in the memory section, I force all the virtual memory to fit in the available physical memory (no swap)

(2) I also adjust the swappiness parameter of the linux kernel.

By default, the linux kernel uses quite often the swap even if you still have plenty of free memory.

You can change this behaviour with this command :
echo “15″ > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

I use “15″, which gives a pretty high priority to the physical memory, before the kernel uses the swap. By default, the value is 60. The higher, the more it will use the swap.

After testing, you can make it permanent by adding such a line at the end of /etc/sysctl.conf :

vm.swappiness = 15

(3) I would, anyway, just try to reduce the memory amount you allocate to you VM. Just in case.

(4) Also check the processes runing on your XP when it is slow ! Are you sure that your Windows image did not get infected by some trojan or virus ?

(5) For graphics, did you set up VMWare tools ?