I'm attempting to run Ishtar, and It will run with out DosBox on my XP system but it goes to slowly to play. If I use dosbox (with d-fend) the game will not start up and instead displays a screen that says disk A, which I assume means insert disk A. I have looked for a CD image file of some kind but there isn't one in the folder. Does anyone know how to fix this?

Did you try to raise the cycles on DOSBox?

I just tried it and it made no difference. Bear in mind that the slow down was without Dosbox. With dos box it just displayed "Disk A" like it was waiting for me to insert disk A. Oh, I also experienced the same slowdown playing Ishtar 2 without Dosbox, but Ishtar 2 works fine with dosbox, so I think that dos box is the solution if It will just start Ishtar.

Mount the game directory as drive A. This should solve all your trouble in a pinch.

The game's name is Ishar. Ishtar is something different, it was a goddess in ancient Babylon. ;)
Try using DosBox without D-Fend, many games are reported to have problems with it. :)

btw
i don't know, but maybe u increased cycles only once?
try to press CTRL+F12 more time...