I've noticed the same problems as everyone else; when I played SE4 on my old computer, the animation would move at hyper-speed if I'd been Online. I'm pretty sure the problem was the modem... The problem disappeared when I got a new computer.
Now, on my (new) work computer (Windows 2000), I have the super-slow ship movement animation issue. I turned off the animate ship movement option, and the problem went away; of course, now I can't watch my ships moving. Oddly, my Win2000 home system does NOT have the same problem, so I leave animate ship movement ON there... I figure it's a typical Micro$loth random bug, and deal with it
