Games Cause Horrible Slow-Down After Closing

[Parshias]

There is something terribly messed up with my computer, and I have no idea what might be causing it. My computer will run just fine otherwise, but whenever I play a game on it, after I close the game, my computer will be incredibly slow. The games all play just fine, its always once I'm done with them that the problem occurs. I think the problem might be with my processor. I have an Intel Core 2 Duo @2.66GHz. I have a little app-dealie that tracks its usage, and everytime I finish a game, it reads that it is capped @800MHz, rather than how it usually jumps around a bit, and my CPU memory usage jumps up into the 80~90% range, which it generally only does when one of my programs freezes or something terrible goes wrong.

There must be something happening with the games that messes up my computer. When I play Psychonauts, I have no problems afterwards, but any of my other games (Tales of Monkey Island, Civ4, Champions Online) mess my computer up and I have to restart in order to get everything back to normal.

[Solefald]

how much memory do you have?

[Parshias]

I have 4 gigs of RAM, but my RAM usage is at the level it always is after I close the games, its the CPU that starts going nuts on me.

[Chicomagiko]

Might want to see if the game is still running in the background with Task manager. I know WoW used to do this to me whenever I would close it. I'd have to check the task manager and kill the WoW.exe process. POL would do this too.

[mootsfox]

You could try turning off Speedstep in the BIOS, it's the Intel dealio that changes your multiplier to save energy and make the CPU cooler when it's not being used hard. It's really not needed though and only hurts performance.