i haven't noticed the problem of villagers switching out of order but i have had the problem of villagers next to eachother having their names changed to the same names. i've played this game on two different laptops - a celeron 1.7 - 512 & a pentium 2.4 - 756(?). both xp home.

in my case - i've had it happen on both of them & on both of them i noticed it would happen when i'd have too many applications going at once (i'm a power user/multi-tasker :D) i would click the arrows to go to the next villager, the system would slow up from the other programs running, then when the game caught up it would show one or two villagers down the list (same direction of the arrow i clicked) & those two or three villagers would all have the same name.

i don't think it even has to be that many more programs. even just one or two more. depends on what type of program. normally i wouldn't notice my computer slowing down that little except that the villagers are always moving around often the other programs i'm using are ones like word, internet explorer, msn messenger, etc. also the more programs i had opened the more often this would happen. the game kinda freezes & it's like it forgets the names & just writes over them with the last name you were looking at. it also happens more when i do things like move large files around in windows explorer.

i have noticed that it happens much more often on my celeron 1.7 512 than on the other. i think this is mostly due to lower model/processor/ram of course and also because my celeron usually has less free space on the hard drive than the pentium.

so that may be one possible angle of the glitch. hope that info helps