i think i figured out the slow game play/ difficultly moving around the screen problem. i've been playing this for a few days solid and i noticed that as i continued, even with a new game, it was harder and harder to navigate the screen and pick up people, and even slower and slower movements. i realized that earlier when i was playing the game i was getting excited and pressing harder on the screen, which after a while, causes your screen to be less sensitive and get blind spots where it has to think really hard to try and figure out what you're doing.
i'm figuring that this is using up all of the memory and causing the game to run slowly, esp. when it had to load sounds (i noticed it happened less with the pretty sounds turned off)
but i found it useful to go into notepad or another drawing program and lightly draw and color, and for some odd reason i don't completely understand, it's better now.

dunno if that's helpful to anyone. but i also found that the game runs faster if its on its own dedicated card... just a little 8mb one.

Hmmm. That's interesting. Mine has stopped the music entirely, even though the preference is on for music. And the sounds of the people were gone for a while. I'm playing on slow as well. Still on my first game. I'll try the drawing thing and see what happens. Thanks for the tip.