FFXI FPS issues & other significant annoyances!!

[YumYumPB&J]

I've been playing FFXI on my laptop for about 2 years now and have never experienced any lasting issues...til recently. I'll try to give a time-line of the changes made to FFXI/my PC that might have played a role in its current horrid performance:

1. My boyfriend was using my laptop to play FFXI and enabled windowed mode in FFXI-config (which I disabled after he was done using it).
2. I installed Wings of The Goddess finally, after deciding to level BLM and needing access to the past to solo. [I downloaded the expansion from a bittorent site and used the new CD-registration key my brother had for the WoTG expansion he never used (he lives in a different state and I couldn't wait for him to mail the CD to me)]..

>>Right around this time I start I start noticing a significant increase in lag in Aht Urgan areas, especially when I'm meritting on my BRD. Macros became harder to press and I'd come very close to dc'ing and sometimes I would. I chalked this up to my unsecured wireless connection which I secured shortly thereafter.

3. Installed a windower and lowered some of my FFXI settings (took off shadows, footprints, weather--most everything to improve frame rate).
>> Lag in Dragon's Aery (but then again who doesn't lag here? Fafnir popped but I didn't see it on my screen...had to get very close to it til it appeared on my screen).

4. Uninstalled Wings of The Goddess, thinking that's the source of my lag. My brother sends me the CD and I use that to re-install it. Then I take a 2 week break from the game, frustrated with the lag.

5. Accidentally got a Vundo virus from some random pop-up site. My McAfee wasn't catching them, so I installed Norton Antivirus, which seems to have taken care of it...I think. No more pop-ups appeared and I was able to successful enable my Window's Update, which the virus had disabled.

6. Still experiencing lag, so I lower some FFXI-config settings too. I'm not very computer savvy (as I've shown no doubt) but I am told to see if my graphic card/driver is up to date, so I go to the Intel website and there's an update for it, which I download. Now the game starts to SKIP i.e. I'll cast a spell and my character will stay in that animation while the music skips as well sometimes. Then everything will speed up again.

7. I learn how to check my FPS in windowed mode and notice that in Whitegate I'm between 10FPS (Auction House) & 28 FPS (in my Mog House). Even being in certain areas with very little monsters will cause the FPS to plummet. I can only imagine how low it is in my merit parties, which I'm staying away from til I resolve the issue. The new "skipping" is even more annoying since I only level mage jobs and missing something due to constant and unpredictable skipping is not something I can afford.

Phew! I know that's quite a bit but it's getting very annoying and as I've said this was NEVER an issue before. The game has always run seamlessly on my laptop. It's a Toshiba Satellite A105-S4064 with a Intel GMA 950 graphic processor. I've since learned that this graphic card is integrated and not great for FFXI but up until recently it was outstanding. Please help!

[Aro]

Sometimes it's really hard to pin point problems like this, I'm far from an expert. But maybe if you've tried everything you can just reformat? Then reinstal from scratch?

[YumYumPB&J]

Yeah, reformatting is what I ultimately plan on doing but my Reformatting CD is in another state at the moment and I'm not sure when I'll be able to get my hands on it. In the meantime, I'd love to know what I could do to tide me over til then.

[Osede]

It might just due to not dual core. The best solution might be don't browse any internet during playing FFXI.

Because the P4 1.6Ghz (w/o hyperthread) laptop I have is worse than yours. And it will sometimes freezed if I'm browsing any website that is number of flash application running.

[YumYumPB&J]

Ah, I also forgot to mention that when I pull up Windows Task Mananger >> Processes, POL.exe's CPU margin is typically in the 90s. I don't know if this is normal.