The background music is not "gone", you just have to turn the volume up again.. something I forgot to do, I always play without the music, and seeing as you've got my sfc.ini file (minus my username & password), you got my settings.
The removal of the Shield Circles was indeed deliberate to improve the look of the game, you can easily restore them by running "Shield_Graphics.bat" in the SFC3 directory. The choice is yours.
V4.0 is virtually done, the server players are using a near complete version, a finalised version will be on sfc3files.com by the end of this week.