Last night I was searching through game files, again, out of curiosity. I went into the Civ 4 config file, with all the options like:

Background music enabled: 1

Well, if you find the one that says something like:

Enable Screenshots (may slow game performance): 1

Change the one to a 0 and it actually speeds the game up a bit, particularly the cursor.

Obviously, if you want to take screenshots, don't do this.
:crazyeye: