Sorry, I have a different experience. Before I started using the DS window, I never had a problem with minimizing the game when either running full screen or windowed. Minimizing never produced an issue with visual lag. Only after I began using the DS window did I start to see the behavior displayed in these screens.
I think there are two separate issues here, one that involves moving the camera in giant leaps across many tiles that is reasonably explained by Rob, and another where there is perhaps some trigger that causes the sim to "unload" certain visuals it never should have unloaded in the first place. The hollowed out consist is an example of the latter, as the AI was nearby and should have already been loaded, so no idea why minimizing the game after activating the DS screen momentarily should have "unloaded" any of it to create the visual problem. There are no giant camera leaps involved.
Neither does the behavior in the Rescue Me act follow that lag theory. The terrain falls apart 5 miles down the road. Plenty of time for the hardware to play "catch up" with any brief I/O lag, or more accurately, since the camera is not being radically moved, it should never have begun lagging in the first place. There is some trigger involved when minimizing the game, in my case after the DS window is activated, that causes the sim to stop loading or to unload what should have been continuously loaded well in advance, regardless of whether the game is temporarily minimized.
Mike mentioned he gets trouble after about 15 seconds of looking at the DS window with a minimized running sim. So why doesn't the sim keep loading the necessary future terrain while minimized? Simply because a running sim is not the primary active window being displayed doesn't mean the actions of loading the next linear terrain patch should stop, nor should it "forget" content already read and loaded into memory prior to being minimized.
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