Absolute putting forth the effort

[witeknite]

You might want to go and get Ad-aware and Spybot if you don't already have them. It sounds like you might have a bunch of spyware running. When idle, my system usually has ~35 process running.

Do check you CPU utilization while playing on AP. Also, in task manager on the same tab that shows CPU and RAM usage, there is a box that says "Commit Charge (K)". This shows just how much of your memory (regular and virtual) is being used. Total is what is being used right now, limit is the absolute max that can be accessed including your virtual memory file, and peak is the highest that total has been since last reboot. This is another good place to look.

One last thing, when your system is running slow like that, look at you hard drive light and see if you are getting a lot of disk activity.

WiteKnite