i noticed that even while idle in the main screen democracy2.exe uses a steady 30% of cpu, causing notebook fan to spin up
this causes loudness and battery drainage
this happens both in full screen and windowed mode
displaying the main screen shouldn’t put such a burden on the cpu, so been able to lower the load could be benefical for us road-warriors 
Interesting, I see what you mean. I will investigate further, thanks.
it looks like the problem is mostly swapping a lot of textures. The icons are each a separate texture, which is very inefficient, and ideally they would be placed in texture pages, however, that doesn’t help solve the problem of mods with their own textures, or the fact that some machines might not enjoy loading the textures for every icon at once regardless what was being shown. So unfortunately I don’t have an immediate solution 
thank you for you quick response