Hope this isn't too off-topic, but for anyone else out there that has had any issues with the QPainter being slow in previous versions of Qt4 (4.4.0-beta1, 4.3.4, 4.3.3....) you should really check out and build your code against the Qt 4.4.0-rc1 build. The painting speed has improved substantually!

For example, I've been writing a SSH client for XTerm/VT100 terminal emulation with tabs and such and need to be able to draw text quickly. The difference between 4.3.x and 4.4.0-rc1 is roughly a factor of 6x! Painting hauls arse! where my app would use some 40-80% cpu usage, it now only uses about 7-10% using the same code, just with 4.4.0rc1 as opposed to 4.4.0-beta1.

Paul