As others have noted, .0616 has a problem remembering its windows size and position on close and restart. Annoying but not fatal.

More important, as we accumulate new layers (e.g. USGS earthquake and hydrograph layers, or storm layers) more and more information needs to be downloaded at startup before the earth displays. This can serioulsy bog down the computer rendering it a stone, until startup is complete; with no indication about what it is doing.

The program claims when it loads the myplace.kml that it is loading only the active layers. This appears to be untrue. Even with no active layers enabled, but lots of them present and not enabled, the startup time can be interminable.

Two possible solutions:

1) Allow the creation of at least one additional folder (beside Places and Temporary) to allow "storage" of uncommonly used layers. This would make them available for use, but Google Earth would have no need to examine or load them at startup.

2) Check the code to ensure that Google Earth is NOT loading the layers, then deciding which ones to show; and that it is instead only checking to see whcih layers are enabled and loading only those.

2a) Add some means of seeing what on earth the program is doing that is taking so long. Currently there is the load indicator for zooms, rotates and pans that tells the progress on refining the current view. What is lacking is an ability to turn on an indicator of what is being downloaded, from where, by which layer, and wha tthe progress is. This might best be provided in a toggleable diagnostic screen.


Note also, on close the save of current state information (or cache clearing, or ... something else) can also take a long time and is probably related. Rebooting while that is occurring (and cannot be seen by the user) causes Google Earth to complain on the next startup that it wasn't closed properly and the cache may need to be cleared.

Thanks for a great program!