there was a misunderstanding; i did a search on the vdmsound forum and did not realize that i got here. the problem i posted indeed was referring to vdmsound run natively under win2k. but i took the chance to learn some more about dosbox.sf.net and am now running xeen with dosbox 0.58. first i had a problem with crashes when playing sfx like posted earlier on this thread. i grabbed the newest cvs-build and it seems to be ok now, although i haven't done thorough tests yet.
iceman: interesting still, if you had the same problem under dosbox, it could be the same solution for vdm.
about the speed; it can indeed be easily corrected by altering the cycles value. but i never get a natural balance of speed this way; which means: the game gets slower the more monsters/animations are visible, if you now increase cycles to have an acceptable speed in this situation, it will be far too fast, when there is only a single monster visible and vice versa.