Battlefront - Extreme slow loading / connectivity issue

The game used to take longer to load for me until recently, as I've fixed a couple of other seemingly unrelated problems I've noticed loading as also improved, more like as it used to be.

I was suffering very bad input lag with the mouse, stuttering when ever I turned to look anywhere. Turned off HPET in BIOS, stopped the lag, perhaps some general running speed improvement. That introduced random lock ups and temporary freezing in SWBF. Solved that by right clicking on the taskbar, select Start Task Manager, and once you have started to run the game, under the Process tab right click on the starwarsbattlefront.exe, and under Set Priority select Above Normal. Battlefront hasn't frozen once since. Setting it to High didn't help and only re-introduced the stuttering mouse. Above Normal priority worked. I've also not had any connectivity problems or too long loading times since either. Maybe there's something in there to help.