I just turned my Sof II texture settings to high instead of very high and it got rid of all the loading/memory leak problems.  and i took screenshots of BOTH high and very high in different places..  THERE's NO DIFFERENCE!!!  not at all.  Nothing visible.  Even textures far away look the same.  Except now there's no MEMORY leak and more fps.  Please try this everyone if your using a high end comp like mine, there's a massive memory leak in the high quality settings of textures, and its obvious it does nothing..  I think its one of the most MAJOR bugs in the game, hopefully Raven will listen to this.  

Also my fps are still stuttering a bit.. 20-70fps.  Any suggestions on how to get things a BIT quicker?  I'm running a geforce 3, p4 1.7ghz, and 512 ram. with everything set high in sof II except no anistrophic filtering, blob shadows, and of course.. with textures set high.

I did the same thing. I turned the textures back to "high" from "very high". On "very high" certain levels would get choppy such as the train station. It usually happened when I turned quickly near the trees before you go into the bathroom.
My guess is that "very high" uses more than the 64MB of texture memory on my GF3 and the pauses are caused by textures being swapped in and out from main memory.

I'm  wondering if the "very high" setting is for 128 MB graphic cards.

I took screenshots before and after and there is a slight difference in quality but not worth the chop.
Also, setting the aniso slider back to zero really helped my FPS.
Comp:
XP1800+ 512DDR Win2K/SP2 GF3Ti200 @210/500/27.30 Dets
Sblive! 5.1

I turned mine to high as well for the jungle missions. There is a difference in the character models in the jungle missions I noticed, less detailed. As far as I can tell gameplay is less choppy, more smooth on high, but it definately allround looks not as good as the really high setting.

An easy test to do if you'd like to make sure your frame rate problem is the speed of your video card is to find a place where the frame rate is low, then go into the options and turn everything to extra low and run the game at 640x480 and see if you get good fps after that.  I turned all my settings to extra low and I get the exact same fps as I would with everything maxed out.  I'm getting 6-15 fps on the helicopter level.

A Texture Detail of Very High is for 128Meg cards. It will just about run on 64Meg cards with the choppiness you are seeing which is why the GF3 defaults to High texture detail.

Open up textures.pk3
Pick a texture, any texture, and open it into an image viewer.

Open up textures1234.pk3
Find that same texture in the /textures1/ folder, and open it in an image viewer.

The one in textures.pk3 is Very High, and the one in /textures1/ is High.  The latter should be somewhat scaled down in size.

Thanks for confirming my hypothesis Pagan.

That also helps me with my decision on my next video card.
I was going to go with a 64 MB GF4Ti4200 but now that a game actually uses the extra 64 MB of memory, I'll have to go with a 128 MB card.