I spoke today to "Paul" at Vibrant Graphics who phoned to confirm that
there have been other reports of only "30-40%" speed improvements
with Liquid Speed (rather than the advertised "double-speed").
He said that the Beta Version did not have this problem (!), and so
felt pretty optimistic that it would be fixed.
He also said that the corruption of the User Plane icon was a known
bug and was being addressed.