Is there a way to increase walking speed (aside from haste spell/potions)?

I tried altering the refresh rate, but that had no effect. Suggestions?

Thanks.

not possible.

I understand the reason for imposing a slow movement speed is to make the game world seem larger, but not everyone has oodles of time at their disposal.

The slow speed is especially problematic when trying to navigate a nearly invisible path through a forested area, which seems to account for a large chunk of exploration in the game. Then there is the "moonwalk" effect which occurs in large, "busy" areas which cuts movement speed again by half. I initially thought this was an attempt by the developers to create a realistic movement penalty through rough terrain. Then I realized it was actually a performance issue since it began to occur on main roads as well.

Anyway... some kind of option to increase movement speed would be greatly appreciated. Perhaps in a future patch?

Some of the problem may be your video processor and how it handles the sprites. Especially if you're having slowdown problems in the forests and busy towns. I had no trouble with the walking speed in general on my 24" iMac. No slowdowns. Occasionally restarting the machine to clear stuff clogging the memory (especially if you're running OS 10.6.3, which appears to have an annoying memory leak in the video processes) may also help.

I think it may be sound driver too. In my MacBook (old black one) game is getting slower when sounds change. I switched to Free audio CoreAudio and it seems to work little bit better. OpenAL did not work properly, some sounds were missing.