Just thought I would share my experience with the memory fix.
First, my Civ IV experience up to now. It was hit and miss before v1.09 came out. I might run until the 1300s or so with no hitch, or I might go black screen and such very early, but it happened sooner or later. v.109 fixed most of that issue and I was able to play most of the time on the lower graphics settings, but I still had the occasional rendering issue or corruption. So, in desperation I reloaded my machine, creating a Win2K partition solely for Civ IV. I disabled almost all non-essential services to the point that the task manager showed 72MB of memory being used after boot up. I now experience a stable Civ IV, but it is slow at times, especially later, and the movies are hesitant.
Specs:
Compaq Presario 8000 8QSXE1
AMD Athlon 1800XP 1.53MHz 128KB L1 Cache 256KB L2 Pipeline Burst Cache
266MHz frontside bus
512MB PC2100 RAM
200GB Seagate Barracuda 7200PRM HDD
PNY Verto NVIDIA GeForce FX 5500 128MB video card
Sound Blaster PCI 128 (ES1373) sound card
The insane mode DOES work on Windows 2K, with some issues. I can no longer switch video resolution from within an active game. It actually does switch, but I am never prompted with the "are you sure" (or whatever the prompt is) prompt and it reverts right back to the original resolution. I can successfully switch from the games main menu at Advanced > Options. Alt-tabbing with insane=1 does exactly what Harkonnen said it would do, causes graphics corruption. I just wanted to mention this because the INI file stated that it shouldn't work at all, but had on XP SP2. Given I'm running it on 2K, I thought I should mention it works, more or less, on 2K as well.
I found that the ideal settings for me are:
vid_mem_usage = 72
insane_mode = 1
The video memory usage might just be my mind playing tricks on me, but I swear it seems even a smidge snappier at 72 than it does at 80. Could be wrong, though.
Graphics settings are set to low in the game, but I do not have animations or effects turned off. I have health bars enabled, single units, low textures. Resolution is 1024x768. I wish I could kick up the resolution, but performance suffers. Still, I tried the settings above with and without Harkonnen's patch and the game certainly does flow faster. Everything is just snappier all around, particularly zooming out to the globe view. I don't have near the hesitation I used to when it is crossing the barrier between globe and non-globe view. Also, the adivsors, particularly military, come up much quicker.
Tvoj patch prosto super! 
