suddenly slow start up and save

[Dwight Schrute]

experiencing a sudden slow down of start up and save-seems to talk forever.

using vista, 2gb ram, 1.73 ghz i only really play in online leagues-two of them.
are there any files within the .lg foler that could be deleted safely?

any suggestions are appreciated.
thanks

[kcgundy]

also running vista, but i don't do any online leagues. I'm pretty sure it hasn't always been this way, but it'll get about 73% into saving and will freeze for a good minute or two, sometimes even crashing completely.

[Bristolduke]

I can't speak to vista or crashes, but maintaining a large message file will slow it down. This is visible by the long time it spends in "saving messages" both a start up and shut down.

[kcgundy]

I did have 3071 .txt files in my messages folder, and it seems like the save process was saving those at about 10-20 messages per second. DRAG!

From my very limited point of view, I have two options. Erase all the messages and messages.dat, or just delete the messages i don't want (in this case, messages 1200-3071) and keep the old messages.dat... but that seems to still be requiring 3071 messages in the messages folder, but now message1201-3071 are empty and take slightly less time to process.

I guess that was the roundabout way to ask my real question, which is can the .dat files be edited somehow to be looking for the correct number of messages w/out creating new ones?? and/or otherwise edited to fix other general errors keeping me from resuming some leagues that may have? (for example, crashed during saving and have incomplete or corrupt .dat files)