I was able to answer my own question. Seems my problem had to deal more with visual studio's debugger going through all the javascript used in Cute Editor than Cute Editor itself.

 

There are ways to fix slow debug times with Cute Editor.

 

If you are using IE7, then just go into advanced options and turn off script debugging. Remember to turn it back on again in case you need to debug javascript.

 

If you are using IE8, then things are not as easy. Seems visual studio ignores Internet Explorer 8 script debug settings. So, you have to work around it. There are several posts here in how to do it.

 

 

What worked best for me was installing Silverlight 2 development tools. After installing go to solution explorer and browse to the name of your project and right click and go into properties. Under the "web" tab you will find a list of debuggers at the bottom with checkboxes. Check the box that you want to debug Silverlight.

 

Apparently, you can't debug Silverlight and javascript so when you turn on Silverlight debugging you turn off javascript debugging.

 

Now your debug times should be much faster.