Excessive lag only at start of a battle. Any solution?

I never had a problem with Prophecies, but am experiencing this often with Factions. At the very start of a medium to large battle, my game starts lagging quite a bit, where the FPS drops so low that everything seems to hop around in slow motion. After about one minute things start to function normally again.

This is incredibly annoying. There is almost nothing I can do when this occurs but just click on some skills and spells and hope I don't die until things settle down. This does not seem to have to do with internet communications (my wife plays on another computer right next to me and doesn't experience the same) so I suppose it is because my computer is suddenly overloaded trying to load up everything it needs for the battle (sounds, graphics, whatever).

As I said, I never have had this problem, at least not to any noticeable degree, with Prophecies.

Has anyone who experienced this have a tip how I can improve things by setting some options?

PS: I am playing on Windows2000 with a PC that is now a number of years old, with 2.4GHz Pentium 4 CPU, 512 MB RAM, 533 internal bus speed, and a GeForce Ti4200 Graphic card (cannot remember its RAM size but I think it must be 128MB at least). The audio is via an on-board audio card, and the board is from Asus. I turn off my anti-virus checking while playing.

Thanks!

I get this too, oddly enough. Either at the beginning of a gvg when I'm playing, or even at the beginning of a match that I'm observing. It lasts for about 10 seconds, then all is fine. I tend to think it's some kind of caching issue, with so many dynamic objects (human players, as opposed to fixed mobs) being loaded at once.

I have a gig of RAM, and my issue doesn't last as long as yours, so possibly more memory may help you somewhat.