A very good game trying desperately to climb out from under the mess.
The answer to this of course is to slow down the passage of time to slow or very slow, but at this level you may as well pause the game, hand out the orders, start time and then go and do something else for a few hours. It really is that slow.
In what seems to be a strange paradox ( if you will excuse the pun) a turn based system would actually speed the game up. Paradox would point out here that you can pause the game at any time to issue orders, which is fair enough, but that being the case why make it real-time in the first place.
The main downfall of these games apart from the real-time / turn-based argument is the steep learning curve, although I must admit that HoI2 is nowhere near as bad as the Europa Univeralis games in this respect and after about 30 minutes I understood most of what the game was about and got on with playing it. There are some issues with the odd crash but these were few and far between and not really a problem, just set the game to autosave each month. One major issue however is when two very evenly matched forces come up against each other, I had a navy battle start on the 23rd october and only end on the 18th december, you would think that by that time they would just have got pissed off with fighting or run out of ammo and gone home for christmas.
If you have the patience of your average rock and don't need the PC for anything else for a few weeks then this is the game for you. If however you have a life and are looking for a game to grab you by the balls then look elsewhere because this isn't it.