Hi Chris,
Well, I always try to look at my network and issues as well. It wasn't doing it before, but we do have this Windows Essentials with Remote Desktop Servers where we RDP into the RDS server. It has its advantages and disadvantages. AC run on the RDS server and each user can open their host session and use all the software on the RDS server. It means that the software runs on the server itself. It certainly runs faster off a VM and on the client which I am moving back to. I doubt I will have the same issues then.
By the way, I am sure you back up to an external source. And, I am sure you know that backups to the same computer aren't the best way to back up. Now, you may want access to quicker located backups. But, I wonder if you know you can turn off that "feature" now so you don't have to worry about building up 15GBs of backups in two weeks or less.
