Ok, this new version is working much, much better for me - except, I am still enabling S3TC texture compression through graphics card settings in order to make the game playable. I was doing that with 1.0 anyway, but the game still slowed down in areas with lots of animated landscape features; almost all of that slowdown is gone now with 1.01.
Oh, and Celeron 2.4, Windows XP home SP 3, and Intel 82845G onboard graphics.