I try using blowfish with SCP but it didn't seem to make much of a difference.

Serge> thx for the SSHFS link. Didn't think about mounting it. It work fine and it's at lest the same speed as SCP.
I just hope nautilus will no go too crazy when the ssh server is not accessible. I never had a too good experience with nautilus, a bit slow at time and crash too often (well, far from all the time but still too much for a file browser IMO)

I didn't think you could turn encryption off on ssh (!).
DES should be usable using version 1 from the protocol (I guess you can have to enable that on the server as it's not secure), so I might try it out if I have some time.