[Aeschylus]

If you're really interested in addressing generally poor performance in windows, I could babble on for a couple of hours. But quickly:

Six of Spades was too conservative. Kill the lot of 'em. On any given windows platform you only need explorer running as a program. So if you do end task on everything, you should be okay (you can even kill explorer- it'll be back). In addition, any programs you close will function as normal on the next start up.

Two caveats:

1. The applications list is present in all versions of windows, but xp/2k/nt also have a task list. Don't mess with it. Taks list != apps list. You can kill everything on the apps list, but not the task list.

2. Obviously, if you have Bg2 running (I think the executable is bg2.exe) you shouldn't kill that.

In addition, update your video drivers/version of direct x. Both upgrades are free, and if either has been corrupted/partially overwritten/etc this should fix it.

That's the really quick stuff. There's plenty more you can do (esp. in XP) to improve performance, but that's the easy stuff. Hope it helps.