matafact,
good to hear your troubles are dissipating, hopefully you are on the right track to a solution. I think RIchard has hit on the key to the majority of the meter issues, and agree that it would be wise for WGT to partner with Adobe if they have no intentions of overhauling the current flash meter configuration.
The only other thing I can think of for you to try, is to remove every other machine from the network while you run the game, just in case it is a case either hardware or bandwidth performance that is rearing its ugly head during the high demand times of the meter click. I'm sure you have noticed the incredible cpu load that occurs during this event, and even though bandwidth is not supposed to be an issue until after the click, with that many machines on the network, you never know. That is a lot of different OS's, even though they are all windows based, that are trying to communicate, and different windows versions are not always all to happy to play with each other.
Any chance your neighbor, who also has issues, is on the same network?