Well, what I'm trying to tell you is that it's not a mystery, if you know about flash programming and memory management on a PC, which I do in spades. Why should you have to take practice swing throughs at all? Like I stated, its one golf shot on a static map. The 'mystery' is solved, it's an inherent flaw in the coding of the game. There is no process that runs on your computer (you can check this by Ctrl-Alt-Del and opening the task manager) that ever comes close to the memory usage that this game does. If I have to shut down all kinds of things to get an avatar on a static map to hit a ball smoothly, there is something wrong with the game itself, not anyones computer or flash cache.
There's a thing called server load and it also can have a ton to do with why meters stutter. This is never admitted by WGT however, it's always thrust upon the players to 'clear their flash cache' and what not instead of simply stating, "Sorry guys, server load has been extremely high the last few days and we apologize for any stuttering with the game you might have been experiencing". They have a variety of different servers running this game, and depending on the time of day and what server you connect to, you'll get varying results with gameplay performance.
Independent of the server load issue is the plain and simple fact that this game requires a lot more resources on your computer than it needs to, and if gameplay here is ever going to be consistent, it's an issue they will have to address in dramatic fashion.