It's already working pretty close to the way you suggested. My ship "Object" has a "laser" property. In the drawing section I'm checking this variable and drawing the laser if need be. It's nice to know I'm on the right lines with *something* at least.

Things are just getting wierder however.
I discovered the slow down at work when I was doing a little after hours games programming. My pc at work is a celeron running at 1.5Mhz I think. Strange thing is, when I take this program home and run it here on my Athlon xp+ (running at 1.7Mhz, and this pc has a much better Graphics card) it runs like a dog, putting out 30 frames per second even if I don't touch the controls.

The code ain't real easy to read, I'm a bit too ashamed to post it here (ops , I've decided to got back to the drawing board, do a few tutorials from here and there and see if I notice any glaring mistakes in my code that way.

As a side note, I've noticed that you don't use the DelphiX animation and do it yourself. Any reason behind this, have you found it to slow?

Cheers for the help

P.s. regarding the energy bar (it's a yellow to red gradient from top to bottom), seeing as it was more informative than anything else and I couldn't be bothered working out how to take a piece of my graphic so I went for the stretch option. It's looks pretty funky luckily enough but I was wondering how to take a chunk of a graphic so that code snippit definately helps.