Declining performance over time

[CautiousChaos]

I'm not sure this is a bug, exactly.

When I start out a brand new Drox player, I set the sector to Medium. It's peppy fast for quite a while, say up to level 10, but as time goes on (in the game), performance drops. I'll start out at 15 FPS and drop to 1-3 FPS.

Here's some points of reference:

1. Performance is not a matter of how long I play a session.
2. Performance is an apparent matter of how far along in the game I am.
3. Or, it could be a factor of how much I explore and encounter.
4. I'm a netbook, so I've got yucky hardware, but 15 FPS is good for me.
5. Intel GMA 3500 stock graphics card, 1.6ghz cpu, 2g ram.
6. Stripping the graphics options to "faster" in options has no effect.
7. Upping graphics options to "best" has negligible effect.
8. Turning on Bloom is a bad idea for me.

I have to think this is because of #3, because the longer I've gone through the game and the more I've seen, the choppier the performance. Seems almost like there's "overhead" I'm taking on during the course of the game.

Oh, performance gurus - what say you to my plight??

-cc