Your Firewall may be the culprit. Program not responding.

[fiveapes]

I had been struggling to play Cix 5 in DX9 on my system. Until yesterday when I launched civ 5 I got a message from my firewall that an application was trying to use a generic host process. Sorry I don't have the details. After allowing this process access, Civ 5 runs much better. Before It would take up to an hour to get past that loading screen and it would randomly stop for 5 to 10 minutes during play. Now I can actually see the loading bar pulsating and it has not stopped during play.
Here are my specs:
Athlon64 x2 4400@2.2g
ATI x1950xtx 512mb
2gb corsair XMS
x-fi fatality gamer pro

The game is still kind of choppy due to the large map, but it is infinitely more playable than it was.

[slowtarget]

The game is still kind of choppy due to the large map, but it is infinitely more playable than it was.

That's about the best you can hope for. You're right at the bottom of the minimum requirements.

And the cause isn't shocking. For everyone out there: If you run "deep" security programs that block things like internal socket connections host processes and other basic OS-level features then you'll either need to disable these (as they should be, for legitimate applications) or accept that you're going to have bad performance.

(Also: Don't post the same message on two threads. I've removed the other post to avoid confusion)