I had a feeling that was the problem, but my experience with this subject is meager so I wasn't about to point a rather certain finger ... when I don't know (for sure) what I'm talking about. But hey, I was pretty close.

I'm glad you have it all sorted out; let me know how it goes with your system's performance! I wouldn't have thought to split it off into a DLL to increase speed, but if it works I just might do that in my projects in the future. Assuming I find time to program games in Delphi again.