[BUG 1.1B1] AIplayer's Don't Animate - Moveupdate? Packets? Audio? Confusion! - RESOLVED

Here's a slightly odd one ...
I've a standard test level for AI shoot-outs. No pathfinding, no obstacles, just run and shoot each other. Scattersky and cloudlayer. 2 teams of 16 Ai. "PacketRateToClient" is changed to 32, "PacketSizeto" 450. No drastic code changes to Player.cpp (a couple of fixes) and none to AIPlayer.cpp.

On starting the level, a number (anything from just 1 to nearly all of them - but rarely non of them) never go into run cycle and just slide over the terrain towards their setmovedestination(). Upon exiting the level and restarting, it gets worse with more Ai not animating. Tweaking prefs::net doesn't change anything. frames-per-second always stays healthy 80-120.

Reduce Ai numbers you say, I did ... and with them halved - then none of them animated. Upon multiple tests it didn't appear to matter how many Ai were in-game, it seemed something of a lottery as to whether animations worked or not.

edit - Having just test 50 Ai from a fresh T3D start, only 4 of 50 didn't animate. On exiting the level and restarting it, most of them failed to animate. There was very occaissional camera lag as expected with so many models (but hardly noticeable). It's really not about the numbers of Ai in-gmae going through their battle routines - end_edit

I even threw in Manoel's old Player::updateMove as explained here, but could not see a difference.

void Player::updateMove(const Move* move)
{
   if (!getControllingClient() && isGhost())//new
      return;//new

  delta.move = *move;
//....

Now, back in 1.0.1 (not using above code), if I have too many Ai (say 50+ in-game) their position update would lag when they moved if I was swamping the packets (with un-updated packet seetings) or - with updated packet settings there would be some camera/visual lag --- but they always animated.

It also appears to be worse if I used Fmod, and less worse with Xaudio. But I'll post something else about Fmod later ...

edit:15feb2010
I was probably getting a bit paranoid by inferring a link to audio.