If you are interested in WPF Performance, then you really need to read
this[
^] article. The WPF SDK provides a number of useful performance utilities. You can find out more about them
here[
^].
BTW - I find
Snoop[
^] to be invaluable when faced with seemingly intractable performance issues - with it I can see the Visual Tree and track into it to see what's actually been loaded. I also love Josh Smith's
Crack.NET[
^] for helping with things like this.