I'm not suprised at that. I got a full version of vista cheap with my processor and I'm regretting that. I'll learn about being an early adopter one of these days. I don't rember XP being this bad at launch. I took a performance hit in everything I was playing when I changed OS. Unfortunatly I cant find my XP disc or I'd go back. I was hoping things had gotten better. I updated grapics and sound drivers the week before to play HL2 Episode 2 and noticed marked improvement especially in sound.
Griffin try setting Shaders Quality to high in the advanced menu. I was having the exact same problems you are describing and that fixed it for me.








