I had the NPC problems as well. A lot of you seem to be using AMD phenom processors and Vista. There is a patch that is activated by Vista SP1 on some phenoms that limits its processing power. In this specific instance you could disable TLB with the CrystalCPUID application and run the TLBDisable.exe found here http://rapidshare.com/#!download|356|101376108|TLB_ver_1.05.rar|520 which may significantly boost performance as was the case for me. However, this can be very risky and should be used at your own risk. Please read the disclaimers associated with these programs.
The Crystal CPUID program can be found here,
http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalCPUID/index-e.html
Hope this helps some of you.
On a side note, it really seems this game was not ready for prime time given it might even contain a memory leak. Oh well, it's still really fun.

Ehh... i think i'll let someone else try this.. lol

haha yeah. It's definitely no substitute for a hotfix/patch,

I've been using that little program for quite awhile. Dragon Age had the same problem with loading screens (got longer as time went on). I've never had a problem with this little program so if anyone wants to try it they should. You might be surprised on how it can help.

I've been using this program for almost a year now. It really does work. In games, it means the difference between a good framerate and crappy framerate.