nikmolson

the glow will be done with shader/comp, There is a glow shader in the material pallete i think but i don't know anything about it.

as far as the streaky-ness of it use a trail to compute velocity of the particles and render with motion blur. iv also seen people trail points for a few frames and poly wire it to kinda fake the motion blur, which is also nice as it solves the issue of non-linear motion blur

try going into your home directory and deleting the “Houdini12.5” file or what ever version you're running. It forces houdini to rebuild all your preferences and what not and usually brings them back. if not that look in your Temp folder and delete anything that says anything about SVGicons or something along those lines.

one of these usually does the trick for me

Hard to say with out having any idea of what kind of geo you're using and how many points are being scattered. If its complex geo it can be good practice to clear any unnecessary attributes and cache out the geo after heavy operations (possibly the first voronoi/delete) before moving on and doing more heavy operations (the second voronoi)