Just noticed that performance degrades as well, when opening a home with sh3d-5.3(jre1.6.0_45) that has been previously saved by sh3d-5.3. That's to day, I experience only "good" performance by using the old JRE with 5.2 version homes.

Now I'm wondering whether the performance issue could be related to:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2850 ... m-8-update