I was having problems with the game going in real slow motion at times
then picking back up and then slowing down again. I switched from 2 sticks of 128 ddr Ram to 1 stick of 512 ddr ram and the problem seems to
have gone away. (I had noticed that when i made sure I had 160 meg of ram
free the problem was less sever.) Has anyone else seen this problem?
Or maybe one of my old sticks of ram is flakey. (yes I know I cant spell)

no... that would be right.
ive found the game to be extreemly memory hungry, especially with all the detail settings turned up.
512 is manditory, and using 256 cauzes alot of slowdowns due to swapfile usage.

I had the same sort of problem and upgraded my memory and the game runs a heck of a lot better.

Have you found that the problems with loading the automap can be solved with memory? I have a 1 gig CPU, with a Geforce 2MMX card, and 384 mb of PC133 RAM, and the automap (especially around Trynton) must take nearly a minute to load!

In my experience, upgrading from v 1.0 to v 1.2.4 improved the automap loading time by a factor of 3. Maybe you still play unpatched version?