Thanks, very helpful.
I have also seen other posts mentioning this so I assumed no-one was using shadows or bloom! Do you mind saying what gfx hardware you are running, maybe it is a driver issue?
Sorry, forgot to tell you: The performance gain that I got was really through NVIDEA panel, not through the settings file.
There is nothing wrong with your computer, the file settings reverts to "no" because the game does not support it at this time.
So if you want your game to look better, you have to go outside the game and use settings for Anti-aliasing and Anisotropic like I do.
Cheers,