My WP Installation Slowed Waaay Down after the last update – Silhouette theme

I’m running WordPress 3.0.3 and the Silhouette theme by Brian Gardener, which looks like this.

Here are the results of the speed test.

Size: 24.63 KB
Load Time: 23.42 seconds
Avg. Speed per KB: 0.93 seconds

I tried deactivating ALL the plugins, which does help a little bit – but it’s still in the 8-10 second range

I contacted my webhost, and they said I wasn’t having any connection problems. Other sites on the same IP (VPS server) load fast and fine. I tried installing the default theme for WP 3.0 just to see the speed time, and it’s still slow.

What could possibly be wrong?

I process .php redirects in a /links/ directory completely separately from WordPress and those are slow too. My webhost said they don’t offer WP troubleshooting, and that it must be my theme.

Im using the Silhouette theme and looked through all the template files – saw a couple deprecated functions so I replaced those will the new and correct function for WP 3.0

Could anybody shed some light on why this might be happening? Thanks so much.