Another option that may be better performance-wise might be running it through
Wine on a
Wubi-based Ubuntu install. Wine does work with Premiere 6.5, as I was able to install, open videos, and render with it fairly well, although there was a noticeable lag** and the Export preview window didn't work, as I think it uses DirectShow instead of VFW (Wine doesn't support DirectShow yet).
There could be other bugs, but going through Wine will take you close to (or perhaps even faster than, as is the case for Windows builds of x264) Windows' own performance. The version of Wine I used in the test was from the WineHQ PPA, with the [admittedly, 32-bit version, although 64-bit would likely be fine too] of Ubuntu 10.04.
**Which is just a fact of life for me; this comp is 9 years old. On anything even middle-of-the-decade-recent that shouldn't be an issue. I also had desktop compositing effects on, turning that off would have helped too.
Wubi allows a user to install Ubuntu to a file stored on the NTFS partition Windows sits on, which also lets Windows uninstall it as cleanly as it was installed. However, the difference between what Wubi does and a VM does is that Wubi acts as a loopback device, allowing a user to directly boot Ubuntu on system startup instead of Windows. It's susceptible to the same fragmentation and volatility issues NTFS is (despite using ext4 or your filesystem of choice inside), but for all other intents and purposes it's a genuine dual-boot without the problem of partitioning. The loopback method and the file being hosted on NTFS do create a performance hit, but not anything like what a VM would.
It also means that Ubuntu cannot directly access the Windows partition like it can in a true dual-boot scenario. So this would require making sure all the footage and project materials are on an external drive or an already existing separate partition.