Worklow for email reminders in SP2010

Hello,

I have a client that is using SP2010.  They have a list that tracks issues and contains roughly 4100 records.  Part of each issue is a set of dates - nine of them to be exact - that are labeled "Testing due", "Review Date", "QA set", etc.  They would like to receive email notifications X number of days before each of these dates.

So my question is - how do I accomplish this?

One way is to simply set a WF that waits until X days before Date#1 and then fire off an email.  But with 4100 items and 9 dates each, I really do not think it is good idea to have 36,000 WFs out there just waiting.  Maybe I am wrong but that just seems like a bad idea.  Plus if one of the dates changed we'd have an even bigger issue.

So I did try the HarePoint Workflow Scheduler to run a WF at 11 every night.  It ran as simple a WF I could make against as small a view of the list as possible, but performance was terrible when it fired off.  It took roughly 13 hours to get through all the list items.

I am not a developer and while we could go the way of writing an event handler to do this, the client is not willing to fork out the money for that - thus I am looking for other ideas\options.   (I did get a quote to do this and it came in at $3,200).

If you have any thoughts, please hit me with em.

Thanks in advance!