Civ4 BTS and Civ4 Col Loading Times

This is a relatively new issue.

Basically if I click on any Civ4 related game from the desktop (Civ4, Warlords, BTS, COL) Even Pirates! loads slow.
Its seems that nothing happens.
If I Ctr-Alt-Del, I can see in the Task Manager that the game is indeed running, just using very little Ram.
Eventually after a lenghty time (15 minutes or so?), the game loads and is playable as normal.
If I load a Mod, same thing. Drops to desktop, 15 minutes later it eventually loads.

I do not seem to have this problem with other games.
I am running Vista, 32 bit if that helps.
Any Ideas would be helpful.

I can say, that I started a project where all the art I have, I was cataloging in my Custom Assets Folder (though very little is used), I did it because I realized that many Mods I played with used the same art, and I found it silly to have 5 or so different copies of it floating around. The slow loads started after that project started, although I cannot see why that would affect if the art isn't used.

When you start a game, the game loads itself (or the mod you chose) and then everything in CustomAssets. That is how things like BUG and Blue Marble get loaded. So, everything that you put in that art folder is getting loaded, whether it subsequently gets used or not.

I guess by not being used i mean the art does not have any xml files calling for it
for example i created a file catalog for all the vd art but the.art is not called on yet.

I had assumed that since there was no xml files to load the art, civ would simply ignore the art

The delay also affects col which i believe does load off the same custom assets

Temporarily add this line to the CivilizationIV.ini in your BTS Documents folder (the comment line is optional but I would add it too):

; Custom XML and Python from user folder are not loaded
NoCustomAssets = 1

Then load BTS. If your problem goes away, then the problem is the stuff that you have added to CustomAssets.

If you prefer, you can add the line to a mod's .ini file and load that mod instead. Same result as line above this means same conclusion.

It didn't seem to do much, maintained a 10+ minute load time.

It does the same thing when loading Colonization, or Warlords (which don't reference the Custom Assets folder in BTS the files are in).

To be honest, I believe it has something to do with Vista, releasing the RAM to load it. Just seems weird that it suddenly started doing it, and after a long hiatus form playing civ. Theoretically the only reason I started to clean up the art was to clear out the redundant files to clear out disk space.

Thanks for the input on this.

I have never used Vista, so I'm afraid I cannot have any further suggestions.