<p>I constantly hear how bad reflection is to use. While I generally avoid reflection and rarely find situations where it is impossible to solve my problem without it, I was wondering...   </p>

<p>For those who have used reflection in applications, have you measured performance hits and, is it really so bad?</p>

It is. But that depends on what you're trying to do.
I use reflection to dynamically load assemblies (plugins) and its performance "penalty" is not a problem, since the operation is something I do during startup of the application.
However, if you're reflecting inside a series of nested loops with reflection calls on each, I'd say you should revisit your code :)
For "a couple of time" operations, reflection is perfectly acceptable and you won't notice any delay or problem with it. It's a very powerful mechanism and it is even used by .NET, so I don't see why you shouldn't give it a try.