We keep having trouble with painfully long regeneration of viewports and drawing tabs when we work with drawings that have multiple x-ref's. Does anyone have any tips or recommendations?

What are the system specs?Are you working off a network or on a standalone computer?What else is running in the background?

We are running on a network slow regen happens on all machines. Our network is new with CAT 6E cables and a new router. The problem was worse before we upgraded. All machines have 8 GB Ram, dedicated graphics cards, and at least an Intel i5 processor. What is running in the background varies from someone who may just have a browser open streaming music and MS Outlook open to someone who has multiple programs including those and several sessions of internet, and other MS Office programs open. Not generally anything that uses a ton of memory or graphic processing. Thanks for your input

I'd suggest setting up a test using one of the machines where the only programs running are the OS, anti-virus and your CAD program.  Have you tried downloading everything to your desktop and working from there instead of the network?How many xrefs are attached?What kinds of file sizes are you dealing with?8GB RAM and an i5 computer sounds underwhelming to me.

We have problems when we have people work on drawings on their computers so we work off the network.Some of the drawings can have 4-5 files xrefed which I am sure hurts performance. Are there any tricks we can use to limit the impact of multiple xrefs on performance? File sizes vary from 2-5 mb What system specs would you recommend?

I'd spec an Intel i7 with a minimum of 12GB of RAM and a mid-range graphics card.So, are you going to run a test or not?Have you run the Overkill command on any of the drawings?Have the drawings been -purged (Regapps then All) and audited?Are you using layer filters?Is the scalelist bloated?

We are running a test now, will try Overkill and reducing the Scale list and will see what happens. One thing that seems like it might be related is that we have multiple xrefs on a job that are referenced into drawings that are referenced into each other. We insert as an Overlay. Are there any tricks to doing this more efficiently?

I have no idea.  We do not make use of xrefs.

Hello F_BURKHART, for me X-ref have various fonctions including the fact that they allow you having very big files without "slow regen".
I did use X-ref making 3D assemblies when having AutoCAD R13 ( year 1995 ) up to AutoCAD 2008.
Now that we have AutoCAD 2012 I can even have 180 mb files without serious regen problems if I don't render the solids when zooming or changing viewpoint, now I don't use X-ref ( 5 mb files shouldn't lead to this ).
You can "re-path" files that were X-ref to make them as ordinary blocks into your working file but you will loose the xref fonctions, see your AutoCAD help ( F1 ) : XREF command options : List of the xref , Attach , xxxxxx , Path , xxxx , Reload , etc...