Storyline for Large Projects

I am in the process of translating very large courses to an e-learning format.

I love storyline, but am having problems with its resource management when the project gets too large.

I want to put one of our smaller text only courses into one storyline project. This will require 60 scenes and minimum of 360 slides. (our largest course would need 200 scenes and over 6,000 slides).

I chose to test with our Latin and Greek for English Vocabulary course. By the time I had created half the course in Storyline (30 scenes with six slides each), I found that my machine (dual-core Xeon with 2 gigs ram on XP) had slowed down tremendously. Normal processes such as text editing slowed down with delays in highlighting a word that would last up to three seconds (unusable at that point). Anything dealing with thumbnails for scenes and slides became a nightmare. For example, I tried to use the "collapse all scenes" option and the program locked as the slide thumbnail images (six per scene thumbnail) flashed on and off randomly.  My processors were also running at between 30-50% while this was happening. If I clicked on the slide tab it stopped, the processors also stopped and I could edit normally. If I clicked back to the scene tab, then it locks and the processor runs. I left it on the scene tab for about 5 hours and the program was locked up tight. The processor ran high the whole time with no effect (major bug).

I also ran a test with one scene and 312 slides each with text, graphic and audio. Storyline choked my machine to death on that one. I have also tested it on a four core i7 with windows 7. The exact same thing happens but I get more breathing room before it is a problem.

I would love to put our smaller text only courses like Latin and Greek into one publishable project, but Storyline's resource management is not letting me do that easily.

Has anyone tried to make a very large course? (at least dozens of scenes and several hundred slides)

Articulate staff mentioned (twice) that someone made one slide with 8,000 triggers as an example of Storyline handling lots of data. However, this is a very different type of data and process. I would like to hear from anyone who has tried to make a truly big course with Storyline with lots of scenes and slides re: performance issues while working on the project file(s).

The workaround for me is, of course, to just chop the courses down to multiple Storyline project files so that it stays in good working order. However, it is very desirable for some of our courses to be in one file.

Max