If you guys ever get in, there's some good news for us!

Good to hear. Yes, we found and fixed the problem. The 4.44 ist out since yesterday and besides containing some fixes behind the scenes should be 20-25% faster than the 4.35.
The new version seems very AMD friendly and Intel hostile. My home machine (Athlon XP 3200+) dropped from 43min per work unit to 27min. My work machine (P4 2.66Ghz) went from from 53min/unit to 72min/unit. Looks like the new core may be hiting a sweet spot on the XP and throwing a bubble somewhere in the P4's long pipeline. Anyone else with similar results?
Just checked my results again, and the new version seems to be running about twice as fast. Running a Celeron 1Ghz.
My WU's usually take just over 60min, now dropped to 40min. :D