Combat Flight Simulator Loads Very Slow!

I'm not sure where else to post this, but I know MS folks cruise it
regularly so any help appreciated.

Combat Flight Simulator CFS1 loads VERY slowly - especially when it says
"Please wait while mission loads".

Now, I'm running a Celeron 600 on a CUSL2 MOBO w/ 512 Meg ram & 32 meg
GeForce 2 video card.

I'm running WinME with all the latest video drivers, direct x 9, windows
updates etc.

I've scanned & defragged, run MSConfig & shut down all but Explorer to no
avail.

I've disabled the intro movie & edited the .exe file with a hex editor to
not require the CD to run it, so the cdrom won;t be a choke point.

I've monkey'd with the Swap file & system.ini file : here are the various
snippets:

[386Enh]
ebios=*ebios
woafont=dosapp.fon
device=*dynapage
device=*vcd
device=*vpd
device=*int13
display=*vdd,*vflatd
mouse=*vmouse, msmouse.vxd
EMMExclude=C000-CFFF,C000-CFFF,C000-CFFF
PagingDrive=C:
MinPagingFileSize=1024000
device=*enable
MaxPagingFileSize=1024000

[vcache]
MaxFileCache=524288


I also tried & removed this line:
ConservativeSwapFileUsage=1

Nothing really seems to make any difference - except the vcache causes the
menu screens to react much better.

Is there some hardware or driver compatibility issue here? Is directx9
trying to emulate directx6 and takes a while to do some kind of conversions?
The hard drive isn't going nuts while this is loading either.