I've been using VPC as my primary development environment for a couple of months now, and I've found my first annoyance. I thought I had a solution, but it didn't work out as I'd hoped.
First, the problem. I work on multiple clients, and often, I want to look at code that I wrote for one client to use it as a sample for another client - more often than not lately, it's with build files and how to do something I've done before. I can't really run two VPC's at the same time efficiently - I dedicate as much RAM as possible to each VPC, so I can only run one at a time - and if I'm working on client A and need code from client B, my only recourse right now is to shut down VPC A and start up VPC B, get the code, shut down VPC B, and start up VPC A and put the code into VPC A. With saving state, it's not as bad as it could be, but it's still not as fast as I think it should or could be.
One other minor annoyance is search. I use MSN's desktop search to index my files - it can't index into a VPC hard drive, so I lose the ability to search my files that I'm using for clients.
So what were my solution options? Both involved moving the main files to the host disk, where I can get to them from my host machine, and they can be indexed. I considered moving files to a drive shared from the host, or using Junctions. Junctions died a quick death. My idea was to map C:\Source to z:\Source, where the z drive would be a shared drive through VPC. Since VPC treats shared drives as network drives, and Junctions only work with NTFS volumes, Junctions didn't work out as hoped. Next, I tried moving files to a network share. That sort of worked. Everything works - but VS.NET gives errors saying compiled output on shared drives will cause your code not to be trusted and may result in unexpected errors. Not exactly what I want, either. So now I'm stuck.
Now, moving files to the host machine goes against the idea that a VPC is a standalone entity that you can hand off, but I'm not using them for portability. I use it for separation of client configurations - for example, I can't get the Vault 2 client and the Vault 3 client to play nicely together, especially when it comes to VS.NET integration. I have clients using both, so I would go through headaches switching back and forth. Anyway, being able to copy a single file to get a whole set up is not my goal - I'm ok with some setup to move a VPC from one machine to another.
Now, the solution I want: I want to be able to make my machine think that c:\source is a real folder, when in actuality it's a network share. I have yet to be able to figure out how to get it to work - but if you know, let me know. I'm just about out of options!