🚀 go-pugleaf

The other day I discovered something very strange: the delay() function in 
Turbo C 2.0 started to take eleven and a half seconds to initialize itself. 
(The first time you call it, it runs some special code to calibrate its 
timing loop for your particular system.) Well, after I installed 2MB more 
RAM (to 4MB) the function started taking an immense amount of time to 
initialize itself. Switching the computer out of turbo mode, curiously 
enough, halved the initialization time - and the time was also affected by 
what else was loaded in memory and what else a test program contained. 
Tracing into the function revealed a mess that the term "spaghetti" does not 
even begin to describe... 
 
Does anybody know anything about any of this? Can anybody suggest why adding 
memory accessible only in protected mode should break this?
 
 
I investigated the corresponding function in Turbo C++, which works fine; it 
is a completely different piece of code.