Vista - ~~Video card/CPU sluggish. Troubleshat with no luck. PLEASE

Hey all, I recently made the jump to Ultimate x64 and love it. However, I recently installed the Windows Dreamscene and then followed it up with Stardock Deskscapes. This is when i realized something fishy with my video card/driver/config/??.

Everything is stock, no OC or anything. Brand new formatted HD and OS so theres nothing that seems abnormal - I infact have pretty much no progs installed yet. My specs as following:
Ultimate x64
3GB Ram
AMD 64 x2 +3500
Sapphire Raddeon x850 Pro
Performance score -- Graphics: 5.9 Gaming Graphics: 4.9 Processor: 4.1 Memory: 4.6 HD: 5.6

So given that, I figured i should be able to run most things fairly smoothly. Heres the problem, with a still background pic my cpu idles at 0%, with a Windows DreamScene video it idles at 40%, and with Stardock Video it idles pretty much at 90-100%! Ram stays at 30% for all. Now i understand those videos can be somewhat of a step up to a still picture, but buddies of mine with similar computers tell me they are idling around 15%. 90% seems to be a red flag that somethign isn't right. I've installed ATI's newest Catalyst drivers (7.10 I believe), ran through all the Windows updates, and made a half attempt to get codecs. Granted a wallpaper is fairly superficial, but I figure if theres something wrong in the video department, it's going to show its face when I attempt at games or photoshop rendering. Does anyone have any ideas? Please help

have a look in your error logs. This may point you in the right direction or give us more to work with. Look for somthing in the last 24 hours.