OK I have the Mac version so I guess you could argue it doesn't count, but look at the game status:

http://i56.tinypic.com/2hxoehg.jpg

40 min for 40 moves for both of us. It took me less than 2 min to make 6 moves, while it is taking him 30+ min.

And it's not just this game. If I set the time to infinity in the game room for example, the computer doesn't move, at all. It only works right if I set the computer's time to something like 10 or less minutes

This is my exact problem on Win XP, i can't find a way to make the stupid computer move without using Force Move. Anybody?

edit: NM, turns out this is the expected AI behavior. Given no time limits, the AI will search for a complete solution all the way up to checkmate, including from the first move, resulting in a larrrrrrrrrge search pattern that takes a long time. The only way to avoid this is to impose time constraints on the AI.

Think of it like this, at the start of the game you can move 8 pawns and 2 knights. Well, each colour can move that so now there's 16 pawns and 4 knights. The knights can move to 2 squares each, and the pawns can move to 2 squares each.

When you tell the computer it can take as long as it wants, it's going to go through each of those options (a3, d6 maybe? How about f4, a5). Problem is with no limit, it's then going to go through all the possible moves for the next move. And all the moves for the next move. I'm not going to give you the maths for it, but there's a lot of potential moves on the board there. By the time the computer has finished calculating it will have played through every single possible variation of moves on the chessboard, in effect playing every possible game. And it's doing that for each move. :P

So, give your computer a time limit. If you're running a computer with 32 cores and 16GB of RAM, then get a higher level chess program that can take advantage of that. If you're just on a home PC then give the computer a limit of say, 60s. That will be plenty hard for most people, but won't give the computer a chance to see exactly how many games that are possible to play given 32 pieces and 64 squares. :P