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anyway, Im dont want to turn zonealarm (may as well throw the front door to my house wide open every time i go to work) but ive got norton doing its auto realtime detect for viruses so maybe Ill try turning that off....hmmmm
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Then turn on Windows firewall temporarily.
What IP do you get assigned by your DSL modem? If it's a 192.168.x.x number then ZoneAlarm is kind of redundant because they'd have to make it through the modem to get to your computer. Unless you have some whacky DSL modem that does an automatic address translation.
I still say I think it's a network issue, and it doesn't have to do with bandwidth. Dropped packets can cause this and they don't have to be caused by excessive bandwidth.
A firewall like ZoneAlarm has to process every packet inbound and outbound. It doesn't have to be using CPU to do this, but the time the client spends waiting for the packet could be the CPU delay you're seeing.
I've got a worse computer than you... but I don't run any iPoker stuff. Pokerstars tables don't even register on the CPU gauge. I don't run firewalls on my systems because I have a router in between me and my DSL modem.
Firewalls, Zonealarm, etc are very necessary for systems directly connected to the internet that have an IP routable Ip address. If your system has a 192.168.x.x number then nobody outside can directly address your system without going through a network address translation.
If you go to
http://whatismyipaddress.com/ and see the IP address on your computer then your directly connected to the internet and you need a firewall. If you're using dial-up, then you need a firewall. To get the IP address on your system go to a Command prompt (start... run.. cmd.exe), then typing 'ipconfig /all' ... you may have to scroll around to find it. It'll look something like this:
Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection:
Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :
Description . . . . . . . . . . . : NVIDIA nForce MCP Networking Control
ler
Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 00-0E-A6-67-65-BC
Dhcp Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : Yes
Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes
<font color="red">IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.3.5</font>
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.3.1
DHCP Server . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.3.1
DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.3.1
Lease Obtained. . . . . . . . . . : Friday, November 16, 2007 8:40:55 PM
Lease Expires . . . . . . . . . . : Monday, January 18, 2038 10:14:07 PM
Addendum: Reading through the thread again I see that you said there are performance differences when it is on the laptop screen, etc. It could be the software is waiting for screen update calls. No matter what I think this is some resource contention issue, and not the software itself eating the CPU. Finding out what the resource is that is being contended for, whether it is network, display writes, or memory is going to result in the answer.
Maybe some of your memory is going flakey.