I newly installed Zend Server CE in windows xp. I installed it in D:\Zend instead of default directory.Other than that, everything goes with default settings. My localhost is slower than internet. Should I re-install it to default installation directory to allow normal speed? or is there anything else I should check?
The location shouldn't affect.
Are you using Apache to run Zend? This ServerFault solution could be the cause for you:
There are two ways to set up PHP to work with Apache 2.0.x on Windows. One is to use the CGI binary the other is to use the Apache module DLL. In either case you need to edit your httpd.conf to configure Apache to work with PHP and then restart the server. [PHP DOCS]
And so I went into the Apache's settings and saw where the problem was. I had it set-up as CGI, instead of loading it as a module. This caused the php-cgi.exe start up and shut down everytime I made a request. This was slowing my localhost-development down.
Changed the settings to load PHP as Apache MODULE and now it all works perfectly :) Thank you all for your efforts.