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[Scatty]

If you're playing it on a dual-core processor (and you probably are since you're using Vista), there's something that might help you.
While Civilization II is running, press CTRL+ALT+DEL to invoke the Task Manager, go to the Processes TAB, select the Civlization process (not sure what it's called but you should be able to find it easily) and right-click on it. There should be some option to disable one of the CPU's so this process runs only on a single CPU. That might help the dropping problem.