Minister Colonise and Ship Movement Help Please

I love this game, I really do.

I just have these two problems that annoy me.

1. I have started my first game on a large (default) map and things are going very well. I Colonized manually for the first while, but want to use the minister to handle this now. It worked fine while my empire was fairly small (I use it right from the start of the game and only handle the breathable myself). The minister sends ships to the closest empty planet, fine no problem there. I now control about 39 star systems and there are plenty of empty planets and I started filling up the breathable ones by hand, but still want to colonise everything. The minister does not work any longer. What happens is I create a colony ship (ship size and default strategy) and build it. After it is built the ship moes to large planet to get supplies, annoying but fine. After it arrives at the large planet it just sits there and does nothing. On this game, using the same ship design, the minister worked flawlessy when my empire was small. Any help?

2. Has been mentioned before, but any tips for speeding up turn times while waiting for 30 ships to finish their movement? Can the display be changed? I have turned all graphics options to low and played with some settings in the Empire Options and the Game options section, but manage to get faster ship movement, but that is all.
Edit /* On a search I found the option of setting the Game times to 8X in the settings.txt file - will try this tonight */