Pol.exe CPU usage of 90%+

[YumYumPB&J]

Thank you everyone! ^^ I will certainly do all you have mentioned. Thanks again!

[Suiram]

I used to have this problem, along with an assortment of related problems. What had happened, I think, was that dust clogging my CPU fan would cause my laptop to quickly heat up, which in turn would cause my CPU to automatically downclock. I know very little about PCs so I'm going mostly by what I was told/read, but I had this issue and a related issue (that I posted about a while back) where certain graphical effects would cause my laptop to overheat and power off.

A month or two ago, I opened my laptop and cleared out a cake of dust that had accumulated over the last 3 years, and now none of those issues have recurred. Maybe check your temperatures when this happens, and what your actual processor speed is?

[Jefe]

Good luck removing Virtumonde, my laptop had it after I lent it to my sister in law. It was a piece of shit to remove, I'd suggest donwloading highjack this and go to the spybot forums and wait for someone to help you out. Although idk if there are newer and easier methods to get rid of that pos.

[theo]

One thing I did on my old machine was to turn Character Models Displayed waaaaaaay down. This doesn't make the game look bad imo, unless you feel like you absolutely have to be able to see all 200 people at the auction house. I found this helped smooth things out a lot. Even on a newer machine having lots of characters on the screen can really bog you down.

[YumYumPB&J]

After running Combofix and a few other anti-malware and virus program the problem with the skipping still persists. I guess I'll just reformat when I find my Toshiba Recovery CD. Thanks again, everyone.

[Delayed]

I remember a long time ago having skipping issues when animations like Tachi: Yukikaze would go off, it would cause lags in my computer.
have you tried different video drivers and seeing if that changes things? I know for a while i haad to use older nvidia drivers to keep it from happening

[YumYumPB&J]

How do I go about changing video drivers? My Intel video drivers are current, if that's what you mean.

[The Stig]

How do I go about changing video drivers? My Intel video drivers are current, if that's what you mean.

Well, you can only update or find modified ones, but as you're using onboard graphics with 128mb SHARED RAM that means you're running FFXI with less than 384 ram (not including all the other stuff running on your system) (and this depends on how much RAM is allocated to the onboard graphics).

You've got little options really

[YumYumPB&J]

I was browsing some forums for FFXI & Windower Tech issues when I found a thread that spoke of a "stuttering problem" that some players were having. After reading through the suggestions, the original poster said he uninstalled Norton Anti-virus and the stuttering issue went away (but subsequently came back) and other forum users recommended that he disable the QoS Packet Scheduler in whatever connection he was using (for me that would be wireless).

This suggestion has worked for others and I do believe it has worked for me! I don't know whether it's because I uninstalled the Norton Anti-virus (which I installed immediately after the virus bypassed my MacAfee) or whether disabling QoS did the trick. I'm running a different Anti-Virus software and hopefully the issue won't come back. The lag has also cleared up significantly. I'll be more than happy to post the link to the forum I got the ideas in the morning/afternoon (though the title of my initial post might not prompt people to check here... ; ; ). Again, thanks to everyone for your suggestions and your feedback! ^.^