Xampp painfully slow

I'm working from my home for a couple of days a week. Right now I'm doing a php project using Codeigniter. It's my preferred php framework. I have been using CakePHP in the past. That one is great for simple things, but once you need to do something that is a bit more complex, you spend more time trying to do battle with CakePHP to make it do the things you try to do than actually coding. Anyway, my laptop crashed entirely and I had to set everything up again (WinXP). But running my code had become painfully slow. I traced it down to my virus scanner (AVG Free, in my case). I did 2 things to get back my original speed:

• In the "Resident Shield" component, I clicked the button "Manage Exceptions" and added the path to my source files.
• In the menu "Tools/advanced settings", I clicked on "PUP Exceptions", I added mysqld.exe, apache.exe, httpd.exe, php.exe, php-cgi.exe and php-win.exe.

Probably I didn't need to exclude all of them, but it'll do. I also excluded BareTail.exe. This is a nifty lightweight tool to tail my log files.