I'm having (had) the same problem, and it's a sound issue. It's brand new for me, I haven't had sound problems before. Turning off the sound fixes the problem. Turning the mouse click off doesn't help, but turning sound FX off does, and battle FX doesn't affect things. Reinstalling from the CD and upgrading to 2.0 then 2.5 didn't work. DirectX isn't reporting any problems. Changing to WinME compatibility didn't seem to fix things, _but_ uninstalling my new 3rd party (non-MS) sound and video codecs fixed the problem. My suggestion would be to see if you have installed any new sound codecs and remove them and revert to Microsoft ones if you can. If you want to replicate the problem you could start by downloading the Satsuki Decoder Pack 2.0.0.6 from
Satsuki's Website
Michael H.