[Bug] Odd Jerky menus and battles

Gratuitous Forum Support
1

ok, I bought the game about a week ago, and when I started playing, the game had a very jerky movement in the battles and in the menus. This is not a straight-forward jerky movement though, it seems to jump forward and back. The battles that take forever, and speeding the game up doesn’t seem to help. Sometimes, the ships wouldn’t progress at all, they would just jerk in place as they tried to warp in.

So, being annoyed that the game was unplayable, I updated to the latest version, which didn’t help, then updated my graphics drivers, which fixed the issue for the time being.

Game played, fun was had, etc.

Flash forward to today. I try to load up the game, and the same issue is present, except that after I exit out of a battle that will never finish, the whole game crashes.

System Specs:
windows XP SP3
AMD Athalon 64 X2 6000+ Dual Core processor 3.01GHz
3.00 Gb RAM
nVidia GeForce 7600 GT
DirectX 9.0

Very confused by all of this, and concerned that no one else is reporting it. Am I the only one?

EDIT:
Ok, it has gotten worse. My fleet never warps in, and the enemy fleet begins to fly in circles, increasing speed so they spiral out faster and faster. I’m so confused.

2

Yes you are. Basically games either work, or they don’t. The only thing that can change is the PC they are running on. You must have something running in the background on your PC that is causing this. If you have any P2p software, it could be that, or one of those hopelessly inefficient antivirus scanners that seems to periodically just thrash your hard drive.
Under vista it could be the dreaded indexing.
The game code itself is 100% untouched between patches, so a problem which goes away and comes back must be some other change on your system. I strongly recommend defragging and also using something like spybot search and destroy to check for problems.