Any specific monitoring counters I should be looking for with perfmon?

Try the ones at the bottom of the list for physical disk.

Does it matter offhand that this is running on an NTFS disk?

Nope. NTFS is generally better if you're using a modern computer with Win2K/XP.

*total loss for ideas*

Checking perfmon for both cpu and disk use shows nothing unusual.

Both before and during script running with qmodem I can see no abnormal spikes or things to indicate a problem.

You start the script and it just hangs there, the comes a squirt of activity in the window, then nothing for a nice long time, then a squirt, then nothing. The whole time cpu and disk both show normal basic activity - a few bumps here and there as things are read or processed but that's it.

The dosbox itself is still responsive, it's not a graphic hang because I can hit escape to interrupt the script at any time (and tell it to continue again) and the menu that pops up at interrupt isn't lagged or otherwise impaired at all - it's just when the script is trying to run.

ARGH!!! I also checked with Master of Magic, and it does the same heavy lag when loading or saving a file - but running each turn is normal.

Perhaps I'll pull up an older version of dosbox and see if it does it for those...

dosbox .58 - loads the script but can't even get past page one of the initial display.

dosbox .61 - gets through the displayed menus but when the script starts to expect input from the screen/qmodem session it can't even process the first line.

dosbox .62 - improves on .61 in that it can start to process commands from the qmodem session - but more of the 'squirt and stop' stuff and then it finally gives up and tosses an error about expected text not appearing and halts itself.

At that point (which is the same as .63) when it stops trying to run the script, it suddenly speeds up again and has no problem with input/output or anything.

I've run into the same problem. On my 2ghz machine, games run quite fast except when disc access is involved, at which point things slow to a crawl. This is not a windows/resource allocation issue, as the problem follows DosBox 0.63 from my desktop to my laptop (both of which have similar specs... 2.0 ghz, 512mb RAM).

Well that's good to hear. glad I'm not going insane.

I took it to work and tried the same (xp box, 1g memory, 2.4ghz P4) and had the same results.