The loading times are killing me....

[MSB]

My system:
Nvidia Geforce 4 MX4000 128MB (yes trees and such like are sprites)
32GB Hard Drive
256MB DDR RAM
AMD Athlon XP 1800+

Vanilla Load Times:
Start: 20 seconds
Campaign Start Up: 1.5 minutes
Battles: Up to 5 minutes (depending on battle size and how long I had been playing for)
First Battle: 40 secs
End Turn: 30 secs - 2 minutes

EB Load Times:
Start: 10-15 minutes
Campaign Start Up: 5 minutes
Battles: Up to 7 minutes (depending on battle size and how long I am playing for)
Script: Script loads in less than a second - time for the adviser to turn up for a script is 10 secs
End Turn: 1 minute - 2 minutes
First Battle: 50-40 secs

I may be better off because I have loaded it to optimum settings for EB on my PC:
Options - Video Options - Change the preset value to speed - (optional) Change the unit scale to normal

Don't worry about appearance - it actually looks better (for me) on lower settings!