Wow, great suggestions. I'm writing this down and sticking it on the monitor. You're right. I was essentially bogging down the file with lots of big 300 dpi bitmaps! Didn't realize that.
Hope you find the solution for copying and pasting the object color to the shadow color. I got the script working and you're right. There should be a script workaround for the default shadow settings. Maybe Peter Clifton or some other script savvy Draw user would drop by and see this?