Not at home now but I assume the streaks are applied to a group on the model then they will follow it and you can control them by the settings in the emitter section
A posting of what you are getting would help
I thought I would whip up some planets to help you
Two spheres off the CD primitives with easy materials. I used materials so I could animate them
tryplanet.mov
I animated the materials a little too much but then this was a quicky project
tryplanet.zip
I loaded the Leopard Queen project and opened a window for the barbarian and did quick render with no problems. This was on a PC Pent 4 at 1.7
Tried the helicopter same results. Will try a full render
The helicopter propel group seems to be the problem if you hide this group the model will render fast but if you try to render the propel group it hangs
I did a quick modification to the central part of the propel group and it now seems to render fine... the mod might need tweaking
mod_helicopter.zip
Will look at the barbarian later
Barbarian hangs on final render
you can control this sprite smoke etc by adjusting the velocity, life ,size in the sprites properties, also adjusting the chors gravity or using a force as a fan force.