Ric, it shouldn't be necessary to degrade either your display or your performance settings to get your Herc VC functioning smoothly with your system specs. I still feel that you may have a conflict with some other program that's running concurrently, hence my previous post. Something else you might try is tweaking your FS 9 hardware settings by reducing your MIP map and hardware generated lights to 4. I have no experience with these settings affecting my Herc's performance, but they sure eliminated a similar affect with my scenery. If this adjustment doesn't solve your problem, then I suggest you go into your advanced graphics card settings for both your Open GL and Direct 3D and adjust both to give yourself a "performance" bias. As for me I'm tired of tweaking my system and have elected to power through the abnomalities by upgrading everything. BTW I'm sure the forum experts are monitoring this traffic, so if your problems persist be assured someone else will come to your aid.--- Ziggy