Vertex program woes

I’m currently using glVertexAttribPointer to pass the texcoords/normals/etc and glDrawElements to pass the index buffer. Yet the framerate is dog slow: 9fps to render 115k tris on a Gf4 4400 ti on a AGP2x mobo. When rendering the tris normally is get around 55fps (still slow…).

I converted the prog to VAR but got no speed increase (maybe something wrong with my VARs?)

Any help appreciated

Did I post to the wrong forum?