Games suddenly running badly, or not at all

skaler2k · 3rd October 2006

I have Doom3, D3 Resurrection of Evil, Quake 4, Painkiller, Half Life2, and a few other games installed on a P4-3.06 with 1 gig of Rambus Ram, a GeForce FX5900XT with 128 megs of ram, Creative Labs Audigy2ZS. All was well for about a year or so. D3 Resurrect..., was installed most recently(about a 3 weeks ago). Yesterday, the D3 Res.. started to take about 2 minutes just to load to the New game/Load Game/Options screen.It just sits there, with the arrow cursor in the upper left corner. It won't move until I click the left button on the mouse. Then, the music starts, the cursor can now be controlled. If I click on the Load Game option, I can select a previously played/saved segment, but the progress bar grows so slowly that I have been unable to sit and wait for it to load. I estimate that it would probably take 5 minutes for the selected saved game to load.
It is loading while I'm typing this on my laptop. I'm a slow typist. So far, it is only 1/3 of the way loaded. . I tried Doom3, which I haven't played in quite a while, and the symptoms are the same. The other games-Quake 4 and Painkiller show different symptoms, but also don't work any more.
Halo, on the other hand, still runs. I suspected malware, so I ran everything I have: Adaware, EZ trust, A squared, Spybot Search and destroy, and even though they found some items to delete, none of that cured the problem. The "loading" bar is now full, but the computer is still just sitting there. Yesterday, I did notice that there would be an unusually long lag from the time the "loading" bar completed to the time the game became playable. At least yesterday, the loading bar grew at its normal rate of speed. Today, it has slowed considerably, and the game is still just sitting there, with no response to mouse movements or clicks. I have previously just abandoned it all by hitting control-alt-delete, and even then, the Windows Task Manager would take its sweet time showing up. Clicking on End Task would take about 30 seconds before Doom3 ends and the desktop reappears. The only other tasks I've tried today is email via Outlook Express and Internet Explorer (Comcast.net). They seem to behave normally. So far, all I've done is download the latest drivers for the video card, although I'm pretty consciencious(sp?) about keeping everything updated, defragged, etc. My previous drivers for the card were only about amonth old. I update all the spy and malware on an almost daily basis. Thanks, in advance for any help. I'm thinking of uninstalling D3 and D3 resurrection, but that doesn't explain Quake 4 and Painkiller malfunctioning.