Does Software Virtualization Reduce a Program's Operating Speed?

"Yes, of course there will be a performance hit. How much it suffers depends on the program, I imagine, but I think for most day-to-day applications you won't notice much of a slowdown. I wouldn't recommend running a CPU-intensive program like a video game in a virtual environment, though.

If you're using 32-bit Windows, I'd recommend Sandboxie for this sort of thing. It seems to be the most reliable one out there, and I don't recall noticing a performance hit (although I've only used it once)."

"Altiris SVS is similar to Sandboxie, you will not notice a performance hit as you are accessing the computer's real hardware and not any emulation.

however, Sandboxie is up-to-date and under active development."