Best Way To Deal With Addresses Please.

Hi.
I have an Access 2000 database running on Windows 2000 Operating System. The database is on a shared drive on a network with approx 20 concurrent users. It runs a bit sluggishly so I am looking for ways to speed things up. The network guys say that the bit rate is OK so I need to tweak the database. I have run the performance and table analysers and get no suggestions for improvement. However, I have spotted a potential problem with the way addresses are stored.

Currently addresses are stored in the person table along with personal stuff like date of birth, gender, ethnicity etc. the address part has six fields:

Oh by the way - this is for the UK so the address structure has to be a bit flexible to accommodate quite a few variations of how addresses can be written but a reasonable guide is:

Number (or house name) and street name
(often a second line for part one of address)
Village / urban area
Town
County
Postcode

Part one of my question is - is this the best way to store this information or should I just gather it like this on a form and then store it as concatenated text in a single field.
I have tried this on a small test database and it works OK and prints address labels etc. - - But is it better or not?

Part two is - should the addresses be stored in the person table at all or should it be in a separate table. This is the bit I cannot get my head round. If it is in a separate table then each record in the table needs to be unique but because of the nature of the client base (i.e. students) many students share accommodation - OK a 1 to many relationship - but what about students in halls of residence they will have an individual room but the remainder of the address is the same. So for say 1000 students in the same hall 95% of the address is repeated although each address is unique overall. And with 4 halls there are 4000 entries that could potentially be reduced to 4 plus a room number and hall name, but I am not at all sure how to achieve this. And then what about addresses for students not in halls but shared houses? I cannot get my head round this. I can see why it was set up the way it was but there must be a better way.

Do I need one table, two tables or six tables (one for each field)?

And how do I then enter data? Do I have to have combo boxes on each line to see if that value has been entered before?

The data gathered would always be entered via forms so I can get the fields together but I don't know how many tables I need nor how best to relate them.


Can anyone suggest how I might get round this problem?

Thanks... Sprocket