Performance Issues in FF1

[seraglio]

I have been having what I would call "performance" issues with FF1/FFX2.6 for years now. Every few months a
new bug starts showing up. There are many: first power swaps like mental damage would hit twice, later
attributes that cloak the target like transmute swap wont cloak. I've had issues with "morphing " powers
forever, danger room will end when morph happens. Most recently feedback attributes slow the danger room
sessions to a crawl once per second when detecting objects. Things that used to work in FFX, suddenly don't,
with no specific action or change on my part preceding them. All built in game attributes and powers still
work...I think. The common denominator I think is FFX code that requires speed..but thats a guess.

At first I chalked these up to my mods, but recently I rolled back to base FFX2.6 files in the missions/script
directory and no change. Then I assumed I had a resource issue with VMPlayer. I tried gog and steam versions
on windows 7 gaming rig and even even built a vintage socket370 windows XP no service pack machine to try
to run it with old CD. Still had exact same issues

A base new install with FFX 2.6 seems to not have issues. But as soon as I bring over my changes; dats,
heroes, scripts dir, inits, etc I bring over the problems. I have tried rolling back every file that has a newer
date...everything I might have touched...one at a time. I can't find the culprit in any 1 file. I've also tried
pruning and defragging all dat files, removing all meshes and hero files... I've heard other say there is a limit
to how many hero files you can have. I have 681...I once had over 1000 and FFX control centre stopped
"tagging" new hero files...or more exactly it would "unregister" a low alphabet hero to make room for a new
one. So I have already pruned that and I have tested with just 3 test hero files and had all the same issues.
My FF.CSV file is 320k, down from 391k (its like 240k with base dats from fresh install) after pruning
everything I didn't need from powers.dat and templates. It didn't help the issues.

Basically I'm looking to better understand what the resource constraints of FFX are. What other files are
involved, what else gets loaded into memory? Since its been a gradual degradation over time it feels like it
should be some cache file or directory thats filling...but I can't think of anything else like that I haven't
already pruned. Or perhaps I have it all wrong and just need a fresh set of eyes.