Thank you very much indeed to everyone who has responded so far. I
have tweaked the datarate to 7.0 and switched on the caching to see
if that makes much difference.

We have the basic New Dawn with the Planes of Power expansion. The
Options screen however states "Luclin Options" - I don't know why.

As for the PC - maximum RAM capacity is 384MB and that is what is
installed. There is 50Gb free on the hard disk. I have noticed that
while loading and zoning however, the hard disk light is always on
meaning it is doing alot of work. I suppose this would be the case as
it is loading alot from the hard disk.

Performance within a zone seems fine on the whole,it is just initial
loading and in particular the zoning times. Very often, after waiting
5 minutes, it simply gives up and goes back to the server screen -
very frustrating!

The only other components that could be awapped are the hard disk
controller - but I really don't see that making much difference since
it is working fine, and the video controller - which is a nVidia Riva
TNT with just 16Mb RAM. We are running DirectX 9.

Thanks very much again for all of your suggestions, and I would be
grateful for anytthing else you can suggest.

Best regards.