Need help - AI takes roughly 3 minutes between turns

Hi

I'm new on the forum, but I've been lurking for a while. I'v played most Total War games and my current computer has no problem running both Empire and Shogun 2.

Anyway here is the problem: When playing on the campaign map my generals seem to somwhat lag. This, however, is not the main problem. Whenever I'm done and I push the "end turn" button the AI takes forever to finish (2½-3 minutes). In other words I cannot stand to play the game.

I've tried with various settings and nothing seem to help. I have, however, noticed that the launch menu continues to be open/running in the background even when I'm in the game. Trouble is that even if I deactivate the process it still takes 2-3 minutes between turns.

Another thing is that I'm not able to play the mod via the icon created on my desktop. I have to launch the game from steam. If I try and launch it from my desktop it'll crash before starting the game due to an unspecified error.

Before that I've had other issues with the game crashing whenever I entered combat, however, after having re-installed both the game AND steam and installed latest patch and imade sure to do everything the guide told me I'm now stuck with this.

I've tried searching around on google, but most threads are back from 2007-2009 and seems to be hardware related.

My computer contains the following:

GTX 580 (latest driver)
Intel I5 760 2.8/3.2Ghz
6GB DDR3 ram
Crucial M4 SSD
Windows 7 (updated)

So it's obviously not a hardware problem. Also - I can play the Third Age mod without any issues, although I haven't tried any other mods.

I found a solution - I moved the entire Steam folder out of x86 and turns a no longer absurdly long. I can actually play now.