I was just wondering wether having an option to switch off the animations (planet's etc) would improve performance? Sorry if that's treading on someones baby

There are several options concerning performance in the options menu right at the start menu.

I doubt the planets are the cause for the program running slowly on some machines. I had the problem too. The planets were rotating choppily. Reason was an old graphics driver that did not support directx hardware mode properly. So everything was running in slow software mode. Updating drivers to the free omega drivers solved the problem instantly.

The Omega Drivers are good; I use them myself, and they solved several problems I was having with games, including some problems I had with BOTF. You can download the drivers from Here, although if you know exactly which drivers you already have, i'd recommend you run Driver Cleaner Pro before you install the Omega Drivers. Driver Cleaner Pro removes all traces of old drivers so your system is clean and ready to accept new drivers. Unfortunately, it is a little technical and requires that you specify precisely which drivers you want it to uninstall from a huge list of pre-defined drivers that the program is capable of removing.

The Omega drivers for ATI graphics cards also haven't been updated in over a year, so if you actually have a relatively new card the Omega Drivers might not be that useful.

I've added a work item for this on the CodePlex Issue Tracker. I'm already involved in some major changes to the client architecture, so I'll probably get this feature added during the next few weeks.