Playing BH-RT. Currently a scenario or two after Bastogne / Ardennes, but I had the same problem on an earlier map.

After a long time on a map (I'm "methodical", one could say), the game play slows down a ton. It's not like I simply slowed it down to -8 or something, but that the game freezes for several seconds and then resumes for several seconds, rinse, repeat. Eventually it's to the point where it "freezes" for upwards of 30 seconds and then gives me just a few seconds of game play before it freezes again. As these periods grow longer and longer, the game automatically drops the speed a notch at a time with the message about a low framerate.

I think the game might actually be running while the graphics are frozen: for instance, I can hear tanks moving, and units will warp ahead once the screen unfreezes. If I'm scrolling when it happens, the screen will warp to an edge once it unfreezes.

One odd thing is that I can go back to an earlier save and the game will run perfectly fine for a while, and start to have the hiccups again after a certain period of time (depends on how far back I go with the saves - picking an earlier one means it takes longer to occur, but it WILL eventually happen). It doesn't seem to be related to unit count since I have fewer units now from attrition. And if I pick the latest save, it will immediately start freezing.

I've tried:

- running as admin
- changing resolution to my screen's native res, and also tried lower resolutions - even down to 640x480x16. Dropped graphics settings as low as they would go.
- changing the cursor
- running on both the Intel GPU and the nVidia GT555M
- more graphically strenuous games give the machine no problems thus far
- updated every driver on this laptop
- installed a BIOS update
- reboots change nothing
- all of my games are installed outside of C:\Program Files
- XP compatibility mode

I have:

- Win7 64-bit
- 4GB RAM
- i7-2630
- nVidia GT555M

Noticed:

- the later save files are almost double the size of the earlier ones on the same map. Normal is around 20MB, the later screwy ones are closer to 40MB. No idea why they're getting so huge, given that there are fewer units to deal with. Maybe it has something to do with the increasing number of artillery craters and dead bodies?

Any brilliant ideas?

Dang, now getting complete lock-ups in the Rolling Thunder campaign. Can't be that I'm overtaxing it with units and artillery holes, since it's just the second map which is a fairly short scenario.

I may throw Memtest86 at it and see if that's causing the problem. I'm not having any other difficulties with the laptop, but maybe this title works with RAM a bit differently.

I also have a similar problem although it seems to happen randomly. After some time playing the sound starts to loop and if i move anything after that or try to save the game it freezes. It happened 2 times in 1 day. It's annoying because i had to restart the computer every time because alt-f4 and ctrl-alt-del won't work.