rttgd,
12,000 actions is a indeed a lot! How many of those 12,000 actions are you going to be able to get done any time soon? Are they all really actions that need to be in TR right now? Perhaps it would be better to try classify some of those actions as things that you are going to get to in the future, and so put them somewhere else, such as in a word processing document, or a spreadsheet? That way you could still have them to look at, but then you could use TR for those items that you are actually going to be working on in the next week, month etc. That might help the performance.
I hope that is helpful.
Phil.