<p>I've found the standard hashing function on VS2005 is painfully slow when trying to achieve high performance look ups. What are some good examples of fast and efficient hashing algorithms that should void most collisions?</p>

That always depends on your data-set.
I for one had surprisingly good results by using the CRC32 of the string. Works very good with a wide range of different input sets.
Lots of good CRC32 implementations are easy to find on the net.
Edit:
Almost forgot: This page has a nice hash-function shootout with performance numbers and test-data:
http://smallcode.weblogs.us/
<-- further down the page.