For you guys with the CTD's, do you have any pre 1.09p 'legacy' units in your My Documents/My Games/Elemental/Units folder? Under 1.09o, it was suggested to remove these, and looking over the debug.err file, I could see several failed calls for game models when my game was 'stuck' at level 3 cities under 1.09o.
I haven't seen any issues under 1.09p (just the occasional crash), and mounts are no longer bogging down combat. I'm guessing some models were reworked/rebuilt/replaced, which would account for mount animations in combat being much smoother now.
As I remember, Derek strongly advised starting a new game under 1.09p, and to NOT use custom Sovereigns/Races built under previous builds.
I'd suggest posting your debug.err files up (using pastebin or similar), so the developer guys can see what's going on in your case.
Hope this helps!