There are no known performance degradations (or changes) in recent versions. Before assuming its a software change, uninstall the new one and install the one you remembered as being fast and compare the two. I suspect you'll find that there is something in your myplaces.kml file that is bogging things down that you've added recently.

Regarding filled polygon coloring, we added correct lighting of filled-polys post-0616 so you may need to re-import the data.