this has been going on for about three days now, but there seems to be a disconnect between my keyboard/mouse and actual function execution. For example, as I'm typing this, I finish the keystrokes about a second before the letters appear on the screen. When I click or scroll on something, it lags behind when I physically move the mouse. It's on and off but it occurs something like every 20-30 seconds and it's driving me nucking futs. If anyone has any inkling/advice I'd REALLY appreciate it.

damn that was long.

I would do a spyware sweep with Ad-Aware (the personal edition is free).

memory problem?

yeah, something is either monoploizing your RAM or even forcing it to use the swap file on the hard disk. it's probably porn.

System Restore is also your friend if it's only been going on for three days.

the thing is I havent downloaded any music in months...and even when I did this never happened--I did defragment my harddrive about a week ago--but that's the only change that I could think of.

trying your suggestion Haq--I'll see what happens--thanks everyone so far..

What about checking the taskbar to see if you are running a bunch of shit you really don't need, thereby sapping your RAM?

Common culprits for me are Quicktime, MSN Messenger, printer card reader, etc.

Try this too. Hit Ctrl+Alt+Delete, Click the "Processes" tab, then sort by CPU. See if one of your programs is sucking up resources and close it if you don't need it, or close and re-open if you do. I do this about once a fortnight with Firefox when it starts getting greedy.

Another thing that helps is to go "Start -> Run..." and type "msconfig" and hit enter. Go to the "Startup" tab and uncheck anything you don't think you need. This does what Kung Fu is talking about, but permanantly.

I've done a good job of screwing that up before, so I take the less efficient method.

Haq and Kung Fu:

I followed both of your suggestions--went through the msconfig thing and deleted a load of stuff from startup, went to the adaware (sp?) site, turned off my computer and went to class--came back and everything appears to be going smoothly.

you guys rule. Thanks all!