There are a few other suggestions on the adobe forums, such as enabling distributed cache on bridge, etc.
I downloaded the CS2 trial and did all this, it's still MUCH slower than PS7 and even CS. I ran a few batch actions on 40 images (sharpening, colour space conversion, resampling) and it took forever on CS2, but PS7 just zipped through it.
They seriously need to look at code optimisation. You need a high end P4... The performance on older machines is unacceptable.