I'm not sure what difference you're seeing, but they should be the exact same thing. There's no difference in the game installing from CD and downloading.
There's no real advantage to using a CD except if your internet connection is slow and you have a recent CD. You'll have to download all updates that happened after the release of the CD, so...unless you have a going-rogue disc, you'll be downloading a ton of stuff (pretty much the entire game).
Performance will be unchanged between the two install methods.
I recommend against installing from CD unless you bought Going Rogue. The most recent CD aside from GR is several issues out of date.
http://www.fimfiction.net/story/36641/My-Little-Exalt
As Fleet says, unless you are using the GR DVD for the install, nearly 95% of the game files have changed, even from the Architect Edition (of the 3.62GB of pigg files, only 200MB are the same since the AE release).
Father Xmas - Level 50 Ice/Ice Tanker - Victory
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Tempus unum hominem manet
After 3.5 years of being away, I've gotten back into the game by via the download client and NOT installing from my original CoH/CoV CD's. I noticed that the items in the CoH folder seem to be very different than I would get with the CD install.
Now that I plan to be back for a while, should I go ahead and do the CD installs?
Are there any advantages or disadvantages for doing so?
Will it improve performance?
Will I need to re-DL all the issues?
And any other problems I may encounter....
Thanks for any advice you can give.