Slow Performance w/ Google Earth

[Charlie McVeigh]

Starting about a month ago Goggle Earth started running so slowly that
it is virtually unusable - prior to this I never had any performance
issues with GE.  On my dual core system, one CPU tends to stay maxed out
at 100% utilization and it will take 45-60 seconds to display the
startup globe.  Once up, zooming in or moving around are so painfully
slow that you just give up and close the application.

Here are some of my particulars:

i)  Lenvo Thinkpad T61, with Fedora 11 x86_64 up to date.  nVIDIA Quadro
NVS 140M graphics with kmod-nvidia drivers up to date.  GLXgears = 4379
frames per second performance.

ii) I have uninstalled and re-installed Google Earth several times  and
I experience the same slowness with both versions 4.3 and 5.1 of Google
Earth.

iii) Per advice from Googling for suggestions I have turned "atmosphere"
off in GE.

iv) When starting GE from the command line I get the following Error:

Error: API mismatch: the NVIDIA kernel module has version 190.42,
but this NVIDIA driver component has version 190.25.  Please make
sure that the kernel module and all NVIDIA driver components
have the same version.


I am wondering if I have some sort of library mismatch between x86_64
and i586 versions of RPMs that are installed on my machine.

Any thoughts on how to troubleshoot this problem would be most
appreciated.

Charlie