[Phoenix-D]

"Phoenix-D, my system has a Sound BLaster Live Value sound card, a joystick, a printer/scanner, and a network card."

About the same as mine, except my stick isn't plugged in.

"Laser mouse. 256MB DDR system RAM. 1637 MB page file, mostly not used."

Close enough.

"I shut down practically every process besides the game before running. Windows reports 92-94% resources free. Runs practically all graphics pig games quite well."

Ditto..

"The machine isn't busy doing anything else - it's just taking forever to render these graphics, as if it is using a lame driver and/or not using 3D acceleration properly, or something. I notice too that the graphics of the magic swords and spears are "wiggly" - off every six pixels or so - does it look that way on your system?""

No, it doesn't seem to. Hmm..I assume you're using the latest drivers. Other than that, I'm stumped.