I guess you could check that the relevant hotfixes are applied, and whether VSS tracing is enabled. Tracing may incurr a performance penality, and should only be used for troubleshooting. don't know if VSS tracing setting is the same in Windows 2008 as it was in 2003, but have a look at
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/887013/
What is the status of your VSS providers and writers? vssadmin list writers; vssadmin list providers.
Are you using the system provider, or a software or hardware provider?
You could also try to allocate more space for VSS diff area.
/A