I found the problem. My .html didn't have BOTH wmode=direct settings! For Internet Explorer, you must add the following to the OBJECT tag:
<param name="wmode" value="direct"> For Firefox/Chrome, you must add the following to the EMBED tag: wmode="direct" Le Sigh. Firefox/Chrome and Internet Explorer now perform similarly. I still think ~40k tri's @ 43 FPS on my machine is a bit slow, but at least one mystery is out of the way. -Dave
