Does anyone have suggestions on how to improve ther performance of the game? There are few options in the launcher and in-game, and barely more than that in the config file. I tweaked what I could there but it had little to no effect. I can not find anything in the registry by the game itself.

I am running the game on a Intel HD 3000 on a very recent Linux system through WINE. The game works, but it is very sluggish and CPU intensive. Must be all those trees waving in the wind and casting their shadows. On the other hand, it is even stuck for seconds on certain dialogue options where there is absolutely nothing going on...

Any suggestions on what to tweak to make this game run more smoothly?

A few things I noted:
- One thread runs constantly at around 100%. Apparently it is the audio thread, and that causes the audio stutter and high CPU load.
- If audio is disabled (the somewhat confusingly named 'Disable loading sounds' in the launcher) then this problem is gone and the game requires only 5-10 % of the available CPU.
- The memory consumption so far is less than 20 % of 8 GB, according to htop.
- Even with sound disabled and less than 10 % CPU load the game stutters like mad.

Those could be issues with wine, but I also fear that there is some pretty bad programming in the mix.

I would guess it is because you are running it through wine. IIRC the developers created LoE with a custom engine and they tried to port it to Linux and Mac, but just couldn't get it to work properly. Unfortunately, the only thing I can suggest is to run it on a Windows PC if you have access to one. Runs great for me with WIndows 7. Don't recall having a single performance issue.