Does EB corrupt over time?

[Tiberius Claudius Marcellus]

The other day I had asked for help re: sprite issues w/ spear/cavalry units. After reinstalling windows, RTW, EB 1.1 and 1.2 and the fixes (no sub-mods), as well as updating my video card drivers I booted up EB and was greeted by a fast and furious loading screen. All unit images were clean and crisp.

However, less than a week later the game takes longer and longer to load each time I play and I'm back to floating helmets/limbs in the middle of marching shields/ horse torsos. These negative effects appear to be cumulative, as starting a new campaign / erasing saved games does not solve the problem.

With this new install of windows et al., I've got no viri, malware, corrupt sectors, and I don't need to defragment. Does anyone else have performance issues that become worse over time? Do I just have a bad version of EB?

[bovi]

Perhaps you should restart your computer to unfragment your memory? I don't know anything else that could make it deteriorate like this.

[Tiberius Claudius Marcellus]

Perhaps you should restart your computer to unfragment your memory? I don't know anything else that could make it deteriorate like this.

Sorry, I thought that went without saying. Restarting / defragmenting the hard drive were the first things that I did. No dice, though.

[LordCurlyton]

Sorry man, can't help you. If anything, my EB has gotten slightly faster over time, though I credit that to adding more RAM than anything else. What's the specs on your machine? Maybe we can glean something from that.

[Tiberius Claudius Marcellus]

Nothing too fancy:

CPU: AMD Athalon 64 3500 + (PCI not AM2)
Video Card: ATI Radeon Xpress 200 series (integrated) - yeah, I know
RAM: 960 MB

But this is enough to run Huge scale battles w/ medium unit graphics and low terrain graphics w/out a problem.

[LordCurlyton]

Hmmm, what version of Windows? XP? Perhaps the new drivers are not as stable with your setup?
I ask about Windows b/c I noticed that every now and then (and this was very rarely) XP, when I had it, would decide that it just plain did not like something about a program and slowly corrode it. Do not ask me how or why or what, eventually it would just be corrupted and those error reports always said it was a driver conflict or such, not that I was ever able to find one/figure it out. Maybe the card or memory is just getting old? Especially the memory if its not ECC (EEC? I always forget) buffered, in which case you start to accumulate an unavoidable amount of memory errors over time, though that should rarely become an issue with anyone unless it hits a critical section. I know that with my old computer I wore out my Ti 4200 video card to where it just plain could not function properly (I also think it got slightly unhinged, preventing it from cooling properly).
And of course it may just be a bad download of EB. That's the only real risk you run on occasion when using a torrent download. Shame there wasn't anyone seeding still basically when I got my new comp, but I can vouch for the integrity of the ftp download.