I often play Party/Empire with my Windows task manager on and with the performance tab open. At the beginning of every session, the CPU graph runs very low, bouncing between 2-20%. If another program is running, like Poker Tracker, the CPU gragh will naturally and temporarily go up while importing hand histories. Then return to normal.

After an hour or two the CPU gragh starts racing up and down between 14-85% like a heart attack on an EKG. This happens suddenly, rather than gradually. It stays like that until the computer is shut down. The computer seems to function fine even during the CPI "heart attack."

Is some part of the memory overloading? Is the computer being scanned? What's happening?