When asking the computer to do more than one task the CPU usage jumps up to 100% & slows down everything. This is particularly annoying when playing music or a video in Winamp or Media Player & then, for example, connecting to the net or even opening a 1KB document, because everything freezes up for 30 seconds until the "new" task has finally opened. I've got a program that shows about 80% "Hardware Interrupts" going on while the new application is opening. I've been trying to fix it for 2 months with no success. There are no baddies on the computer for definite. The task manager shows as 100% CPU usage until the new application, (whatever it may be), opens. There are no conflicts with any drivers & everything is working fine on the computer & is really fast at everything, until i ask it to do more than one thing at the same time. Using Windows XP with Athlon AMD computer. :eek: Please help, coz it's doing my head in.