Well the texture size fixed it, at least in purple main arena... Perhaps in my previous AH install it was set to 256. All textures. skins, maps load speedy fast there. In the orange arena it does load much faster, but still doing testing to see if it runs super fast as I remember it.
For the sound driver, the last time I tried updating it the system became unstable and crashed and had to revert to default settings but not before I had partially deleted 'creative labs audigy' and could never find the CD nor online to get it back to control the equalizer from desktop. THe sound has been fine ever since.
For the Video driver, well, I am the person that believes 'If it aint broke, don't fix it', because I learned my lesson from trying to update the sound driver based on it's recommendation. I'd really hate to screw up my system if it runs without hiccups. Unless you have a specific recommendation?
As for malware, I run both Unhackme and Avast and they've never interferred before playing the game. Unhackme is an anti-root kit which a year ago found some 'unknown processes that were identified as suspicious. Since then it boots from DOS, does the checks, and doesn't find anything.
But as I said before the 256 texture size works great.
A super thanks to all those trudging through this with me <S>