Bard swarming ?'s - settings

[Calibix]

So I have been swarming lately because my pocket healer is on a week vacation and I've been having some trouble finding groups. After a lot of deaths, I have adjusted some settings to deal with fps/lag/hitching issues I have when doing larger pulls of 40 or more mobs. I turn Shadows off as well as particles and this has helped greatly, yet I still have some problems during large pulls. It has even caused me to DC twice now, and I haven't DC'd once since I started playing P99 (assuming it wasn't an ISP issue, but my ISP is pretty stable although not super fast). I notice when I look back at the swarm I get more of the issues, presumably from rendering so many models.

My system is an i5-2500k, GTS 450, 8gb ram, windows 7 ultimate. I use mouse turning because I cannot get the tap turning method to work properly (feels like it doesn't support 3 movements keys at once, nor can I get it to auto-strafe run properly). I have /hidecorpse all macroed so I can hide corpse's as I kill to prevent accidental looting ie death.

Does anyone have any recommendations as to what could be causing those issues, or any other suggestions as to how to improve performance during swarming? I figure since 20 mobs will kill me in one round if I mess up anyways, I might as well go for broke and just pull as many as I can, but it is very frustrating to die to an issue that wasn't necessarily under my control.

Thanks in advance.