2048 Portable lag?

I've been experiencing lag (multiple seconds at times) in 2048 portable. I have tried multiple USB flash drives, drive formats, formats, computers and reinstalls of the app and portable apps platform and received no joy.

Computers used for testing have recent i5, i7, and FX series processors with 12 to 24GB of RAM, all have discrete GPUs of varying model/brand and USB 3.0. Both onboard USB ports and powered hubs were tried. Win 7 and 8.1 exhibit similar behavior.

Flash drives tested ranged from commodity 2.0 drives to 180MByte/s read 90MByte/s write 64GB units. I have not had the opportunity to test using UASP supported drives.

I have also changed the Windows "removal policy" for the drive to the "better performance" setting without any positive result. In a moment of curiosity I even let UltraDefrag go to town on the flash drive (despite this being an obviously lame idea) but no benefit was noted.

Thoughts? Fixes? Help?