too much overhead in vb/asp.net data transfer

I guess I could have put this is many different forums, but anyway..

I am using asp.net web services to populate my tables in vb.net. This works fine when the return dataset is only 1000 rows, but many of the tables I get back are 50,000 rows or more.

After it took me around 15 secs to return a dataset of 24k rows, I decided to do a test. I made an app with a table and 2 buttons. The first button created a dataadapter and filled the dataset in vb.net and the second button called asp.net which filled the dataset remotely and returned it. The first button took 2-3 secs and the second button took 10-12 sec.

This is a crazy difference. Is there any way to cut down on this? I attached a pic of my system monitor during the two calls, and it seems asp.net is passing back a lot more data and then it's having to be processed when it gets back. Is this because the data is wrapped in XML? If so, is there a way to prevent this?

Any thoughts/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.