I finally tracked this stupid error down.. it has been plaguing us for the last month or so. The problem was particularly difficult to track down because it only happened when a large number of chance things co-occurred in the Game Engine, ultimately resulting in a crash, which was then repeated over and over, and held up all the games. I had to ultimately walk through the game step by step in a debugger many times to be able to narrow the problem down and discover the bug. Now that its solved, I think the game engine should run smoothly from now on, and we shouldn't have any more of these delays.