Interesting update for everyone... Had my brother who also plays Entropia come over to my house after work and login to one of my systems, and wouldn't you know, no major issues!! Granted, he had the occasional short pauses in game as most people have been describing lately, but this was worlds of difference when compared to playing with my avatar. Not once did he experience the constant item busy, failed notifications, rubber banding of mobs long pauses during combat, reduced heal due to movement notifications, loot lag, mining lag, auction lag, etc... He played for roughly half an hour at the same server, hunting the same mobs, on the same land area at basically identical coordinates.
After he concluded his short test run, I logged back in under my account on the same computer he just used. My avatar was left approximately where he had been standing, and I began to kill mobs around me. All of the problems experienced before had returned! Now up to this point I had tried all of the normal procedures when trouble shooting, including switching computers, reinstalling the game client, switching internet connections, booting to alternate operating systems, as well as disabling my firewall and antivirus. None of this had any impact on my in game performance. At this point I say "fuck it, let me try running with your game settings" to my brother and had him log back under his account to screenshot all of his in game settings. Keep in mind that I normally run with every setting maxed out regardless of which of my rigs I play on. I log back into my account and duplicate all of his game settings, apply them, restart the game, and magically almost every one of my issues was immediately resolved.
I hunted for an hour with only an occasional slight pause here and there, but with none of the infuriating symptoms from before. Never have I had to change my game settings to resolve performance issues, so this was definitely a shock. Sorry for the lengthy story, but hopefully someone out there can also resolve their issues trying similar steps to mine. I haven't had a chance to play with the options in game to try and isolate the cause, but if I do, I will definitely report back.
****UPDATE****
I believe that the problems were somehow related to my graphics/advanced settings. When I was experiencing all of the major lag issues everything was set to the maximum levels, which is how they have always been since first playing the game. The systems I run Entropia on far surpass any of the system requirements and I had no noticeable graphical slowdowns before tweaking with the settings.
Dorki will sleep longer tomorrow then 
