[fedora-virt] performance regressions in Fedora 13?

I used kvm/virt-manager heavily in Fedora 11 (helped me a GREAT deal in getting my RHCT). Now, I'm trying to use it again in Fedora 13 to prepare for my RHCE, but I'm finding it a LOT slower. I can't install with an ISO image on my external driver (using ntfs-3g), it keeps failing with a permissions error. However, if I copy my ISO over to my home folder, and it picks it up. I also tried using the actual RHEL 5.5 and 5.4 CD's that I have to install from, but even though it's mounted and I can view the contents in Nautilus, virt-manager says that /dev/sr0 has no media present. So I tried to store the (preallocated raw) VM image on my external driver, but that fails too. So I have to have my VM virtio disk file on the same hard drive that the ISO is on trying to do the install, which takes nearly 20 hours installing RHEL 5.4. I did manage to get 5.5 installed before on this (by leaving it running overnight), but the performance was terrible. Also, I thought Fedora 13 was supposed to automagically set up virtual bridges for the VMs to use, but the only option I have is NAT, it says that there are no bridges configured, even though I have a virbr0 interface when I run ifconfig. Any help would be appreciated, as I have no desire to install VritualBox. -Kenny