Content deployment (PRIME) still frustratingly buggy

Right now im investigating content deployment options at a client and even after all the infrastructure updates content deployment seems to be buggy still. Its not the fact that its just buggy, its also highly unpredictable.
Sometimes content-types just dissapear in the destination site, or the import/export gives randomly access denied on files while importing. [...]

STSADM or any assembly loading terribly slow, behind firewall or VPC/VMWARE?

A small tip which i found here: http://www.dynasign.nl/blog/?p=9 
In short:
Apparently, when STSADM executes, it tries to load strong named assemblies which need to be verified against an authentication provider externally.  When your environment has bad network access or no network access, it waites for a timeout before continuing. Which makes provisioning your sites, or any STSADM [...]