Low FPS. How to disable shadows completely?

Dear Blizzard support representatives,

As trying to get help or even an answer from the Russian-speaking Technical Support seems hopeless and usually is just a waste of time, I will post my questions here in English. I sincerely hope that the English-speaking Technical Support will try to help or at least advise me what to do the same way as you guys always did when I was playing on the European realms.

Problem description:

I have Acer 5930G laptop with Intel P7350 CPU @ 2.00 GHz, 3 GB RAM and nVidia 9600M GT GPU running Windows Vista 32. Before I updated WoW to 3.0, this system was running the game smoothly at 1280x800, 60 FPS with Vsync in almost any location, except heavy raid or BG boss fights where my FPS would go down to 40-45. I had all graphics details at maximum, 4x multisampling and quite a number of different addons.

Now, since I updated WoW to 3.0, the same system is running the game at 1280x800, 60 FPS with Vsync until I meet other players or approach a group of NPCs - after that my FPS goes down to 28-35 immediately, during heavy raid or BG boss fights it drops to unplayable 10-15 FPS all the time. I updated the system BIOS, video and network drivers to the latest versions, removed all addons and Cache, WTF and Interface folders, even removed and reinstalled WoW completely – these actions didn’t have any effect. I set the camera distance to minimum, changed all graphics details to minimum and set multisampling to 1x – this didn’t help either. It seems that the new shadows system is causing some graphics lag – FPS goes down only when other players or NPCs appear on the screen, using "fixedFunction" in Config.wtf seems to have no effect at all.

Problem summary:

showing very solid graphics performance pre-3.0 with all details maxed, 4x multisampling and lots of addons, now the game is barely playable with all details at minimum, 1x multisampling and no addons at all.

I tried to search both European and US forums but couldn’t find any solution. Thus, could you please give me a hint:

1. How to go back to the old shadows system or disable the character shadows completely. I’m surprised there is no such option even though it could help lots of people who experience problems with the new shadows system.

2. May be you could advise what else to look at, because I tried everything I could think of but was unable to resolve the FPS issue.

Please don’t tell me my laptop is not a gaming monster and I should upgrade to play WoW: I bought it 2 months ago, it used to run WoW and still runs other games (Crysis for example) just fine.

Thanks in advance!