I have installed StarCraft BroodWar to the computer listed below. The game runs flawlessly with Patch 1.10 and networks on my LAN fine with other machines running XP Home and Win98se. The problem is watching replays (an especially enjoyable pastime for me!). The replays on this machine at 16x replay only run about as fast as 2x or slower on all my other machines. Why is this? The GX 270 should blow all the other machines out of the water given the CPU and amount of RAM. Even my bottom-of-the-line Inspiron Laptop running XP Home with SHARED VIDEO memory on the integrated video card runs replays faster. I upgraded the 512meg RAM that came with the Optiplex to a total of 2.5gig with no improvement.

Spyware and Antivirus scans come up empty and the GX270 runs fine in all other applications. Suggestions? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

Dell Optiplex GX270 Small Desktop
Intel P IV 2.9gigHz
2.5gig RAM
NVIDIA G-Force4 MX440 AGP 8x
WinXP Pro
40gig HD

i dont really think that theres a problem with your system... if you can remember the requirements to run the game, it can run perfectly fine even with a a 700Mhz duron system 128mb RAM.
i think the problem is with the application (starcraft itself)
try to reinstall it and upgrade to the latest version (1.15.1)

Thanks for the suggestion, but if I upgrade to the latest version (1.15.1), then I won't be able to watch those wonderful replays that I so cherish. Replays will only play true on a machine running the version on which they were originally played.