Is the speed of the game, in terms of movement and such, affected at all by my computer's processor speed? In fact, is anything in VV impacted by the fact I have a P3, clock is high but I can't remember exactly, and 750+ ram. Most folks have P4s, I guess, this computer is almost four years old.

Oh, I have a fast graphics card with lots of memory on it, too. I've turned off just about everything I can when I'm playing, but I still get a lot of jerkiness and such.

In fact, even the movement of my hand/cursor is jerky, slooooow at times, and I get screen freezes.

I've tested VV on everything from fast P4s and dual-processor systems, to pretty dang slow P2s, and have found that the villagers (and cursor) do move more slowly on the slower computers. It isn't necessarily all about processor type and speed. There are a lot of factors that affect game performance. When you also take into consideration that the game will yield priority to other applications, you can definitely see jerkiness when a lot of stuff is going on in the system (e.g. Windows background tasks, other apps, etc.).

Thanks, I'm going to search and destroy other things going on when I'm in obsessive mode.

Another question on this subject: If you have more than one game going on using different screen names, does that slow things down? When I had just one village, things seemed faster, but I don't know if that is actually the case.

Before going in VV now, I unload everything I possibly can, I use System Mechanic to recover and defrag memory, and then start up VV. Things are still moving slowly with freezes and such, but it is better than when I was running my usual stuff along with VV.

Having multiple games in multiple player slots should not affect game performance. The only game that is running is the currently selected player, and all other players are "off" (like when the game isn't running).

have you updated your drivers? and directx? that could help

Drivers for my graphics card? That I should do, thanks for the reminder! I have a NVidia GeForce 2 with extra memory on it. My computer has 768MB RAM although I suspect it isn't using all of it. (I welcome any ideas on how to force it to use all of the memory I bought, or to check on this... for many years I knew this stuff off the top of my head, even built my own computers back in the 80s, but since moving on three years ago to another occupation, this info has rolled right out of my head).

I have DirectX 9 -- I thought I only had version 8, but it must have come in an update or I just forgot I installed it. With Everquest, not updating DirectX meant crawling through the game, so I should have remembered that one.

Going off to check my graphics card drivers...