Recent update for vista from WU causing BF2 to lag horribly?

Recently i found that after playing BF2 for a while without issues under vista problems have arised. I get random horrible hard drive thrashing which causes the game to just skip and be so choppy im forced to either wait it out (will eventually stop) or close the game. When it does stop it will happen again later...then stop again etc..

I disabled indexing options and defender hoping that would solve it. It didnt :/

I really dont know whats causing it. I even reinstalled vista in hopes something was just screwed up and i couldnt figure out what caused it but the same problem happened again.


Im hoping that there are others out there that have found this to be true on their system or at least help me figure out whats casuing it.

As for things running here is what i have running while playing BF2:

Xfire
AVG Antivirus
Windows Sidebar


Any help would be greatly appreciated

Well i have narrowed it down to punkbuster. I can play the game just fine in single player. I can play the game online if its not a PB server. When i join a PB server this happens.

I have updated my punkbuster...i have reinstalled the services..i have even tried pb_sleep 500. Nothing seems to solve this. It has been happening for about 3 weeks now and i dont know why.

Just at thought, but is punk buster running with elevated privilges?
i.e did you install it by right-click - run as administrator???

If you use Media center at all as a DVR make sure it isnt running when your gaming. While XP MCE used to give me an Icon on the taskbar telling me it was recording Vista seems to record silently and often.

Heres my example. Even though I had MCE to record Stargate only during its first run and no repeats it would record the first run and all the repeats because the channel wasnt sending all the info as to when it originally aired etc. it got to the point i opened MCE to see the show and i had about 27 episodes after a marathin from a season that aired years ago.

I have also noticed most popular antivirus programs were running at prime gaming times and really slowed me until i changed the schedules.

Just a couple of other things to check while looking into punkbuster.

Im having the same problem. Did you find a solution?

Not at all. I have contacted punkbuster and had a ticket open with them. They were talking with me for a bit but seems they have forgotten all about me.

On a side note it seems the problem, for the most part, went away with a punkbuster update. I also added 2gb of ram to my system totalling 4gb.

Im not sure what the solution is but i do know there has to be one other than going back to XP.