Vista - slow network bridge

I run a wired file sharing network with static IPs an have a wireless link (dhcp ip assigned) to my router . I bridge my wireless connection with a wired one to the main server on the file sharing network. The wired link runs at approx 8MBps even though its all (admittedly cheap) gigabit kit. With no bridge, and the wireless link disabled the wired link runs at 45MBps. I don't understand why the bridge causes such a drop in speed. All i can think of is that the bridge is running at 100mbps even tho it shows 1Gb.

Router
|
|
Vista PC---switch---WHS PC

The system worked fine when i ran win xp 32bit instead of vista.

thanks in advance for the help

the bridge is just what speed the actual bridge is reporting, not the connection speed between the two connections.your speed would in fact be 8Mbps.
to fix this, remove bridge and connect computer to router, connect server to router as well and there you go, theres the top connection speed of 45Mbps
so it will be like this

..........router...........
....|.................|.....
vista pc......server box

but two problems, the router needs to be wireless, and get a cat6 ethernet cable to connect the vista pc to the router

Due to physical restrictions the hardware set up you recommend isn't feasable.

With regards to the 8Mbps, where is my data going to reduce it to such a speed? Surely as with my XP system the connection from ethernet-switch-server is all 1000Mbps theoretically. The bridge is just a bog standard software affair in Vista linking a 54Mbps wifi link to the router with the 1000Mbps wired connection. Where the does the 8MBps come from?

there?
and the wireless will be giving you the biggest slow down, i have a 100Mbps between two computers on my network both wired and transfer rate is 3.9Mbps, dont get this confused with actual sharing rates as you need to work out the difference between MBps and Mbps, they are completely different.
think about it like your internet connection, your ISP will report your connection speed at (for example) 10MBps, but your actual connection speed will be 1Mbps, understand?

Thats the issue, why is the wired link running at 8MBps? When its the only link active i do get 45MBps of the theoretical max of 1000mbps (i understand the difference between bits and bytes and so far in these posts i've yet to confuse the 2). However when bridged with the wifi interface which has a theoretical max of 54Mbps that is when the problem becomes apparent.

you dont, thats not your transfer rate, thats your reported speed, and its 54G, (54MBps)

The reported speed for the wired link when bridged is not 8MBps, its reported as 1Gbps. Actual throughput is 8MBps.

With regards to my wifi network, the theoretical max for a 54g is 54Mbps, Google it.

My apologies to you on one point MrNeeds. On a couple posts i had accidently posted 8Mbps when it should have read 8MBps. With regards to the issue tho it doesn't change anything, its still performing far slower than it should do. I've gone back and changed the mistakes. The first post has always been and remains accurate.

you wouldn't know exactly what the output is for the wired connection as you are transferring to/from the wireless connection. you will get an accurate bitrate if you hard wire both computers to the router, then try and transfer again and tell us what your speed is.