Starting with 2A, the game has run so slow that it is unplayable.  It literally takes 20 minutes or so to go from clicking the icon to the main menu.  Waiting at the main menu for any period of time does not aleviate this.  Neither did turning volumes to off.

But, based on my experience with EVE and my Realtek 97 Audio issues, I used the hardware manager to disable completely my audio for my entire computer and then launched Elemental.

Viola, NO slowdown, and runs with just minor stutter (likely because my computer is old!).

So   I can easily reproduce this bug, and have no idea what information other than that my soundcard is a built in Realtek 97 Audio  is needed. 

I believe this is also the same bug reported in https://forums.elementalgame.com/386163 as well as other posts I have seen during the Beta.