OMG!
Down from ~6 minutes to 6 seconds for the XML progress bar. It does seem to load a bit faster from there on also.
I even installed the thing in half the time it took the old version to load. What's up with that?!
Thanks for giving us back the birds. And the PLE tooltips. It's good to be able to find the unit you want in a big stack of simliar ones again.
Did you do something with some of the icons (buttons)? The buildlist icon for the Inn is clear as crystal now. And for the Monument/Obelisk, although I can't remember if that wasn't already unblurred. I haven't come across any other icons that you might have tweaked, so I'm thinking you only put in those as testers.
One ever so slightly negative point, though, is the missing soundbytes from some battles. Yea, I know it happened before, but it seems more occurrent this time around. I'm trying to isolate when it happens, but it comes and goes. On the other hand, if noone else experiences this, then I should probably just reinstall. I'm only assuming it's a known bug, cos it was also happening in the old install.