New characters causing lag.

[Razar]

Well Met!
As I am new to the game and creating characters and trying new things, I found that when I create more characters, the game has more lag. When I delete characters, the lag goes away. I am currently settling for having only four characters. I searched the forums and did not find any posts with this problem. I do run a system that is on the low end. But to my knowledge, the number of characters created should have no bearing on game performance. Yet, it does for me. This is repeatable at any time of day.

Now, I expect a certain amount of graphics lag with my system. And I will not complain when I start getting frame rates around 3 or 4 per second in crowded areas. But I shouldn't be restricted on the number of charcters I can make.

My system is a Presario RS3000+.
It has a variable speed processor that max's at 1.6 Ghz. Ussually runs at half speed.
It has 512Mb RAM with my virtual memory set at a static 1.5 Gb.
I have adsl with a throughput of 64kbs/up and 128kbs/down after taking Internet overhead into account.
I'm running Windows XP SP2 - Home Edition. Fully patched with updated drivers.
I have a Westell ADSL modem that has a builtin firewall.
I have a Linksys router WRT54GS that has a builtin firewall.
I'm running Windows Firewall.
All firewalls have all ports opened/forwarded that the game requires.
I have a built in graphics card (32Mb) that shares memory with RAM. With the way it is setup, I'm out performing my girl friend's desktop system that has 64Mbs Video memory 1.6 Ghz processor.

As a side note: I play in either in full screen or windowed mode with both showing the same effect verses the number of characters. I do not take any performance hit for running in window mode verses full screen.

EDIT: I have found the solution (or work around). If I enter the game with the newly created character, then exit the game, then enter the game with an old character, and then exit the game, then reset my UI, it solves the problem. Any other method of TS'ing has no effect. Only thing I can think of is that something in the UI is getting hosed when I create a new character.