>Then I would have to side with John. Limit the vitual memory. Add physical memory.
>
>>The "system" process is using the most when the cpu pegs out.
>>
>>With these processes running the cpu stays at around 5-10%
>>

When I bought my first machine from DELL - a PII 233mhz, 128meg, 4gig 10,000rpm SCSI on C:, CD-ROM, Win98 I think - I was very disappointed because it felt slower than the Pentium Pro 200mhz with 2 gig SCSI sitting beside it.
After 3-4 days I decided it WAS slower and started looking around. Eventually I came across the "Device Manager" of ControlPanel|System and the list of devices showed a yellow mark beside the SCSI Controller entry.
I had no idea what this meant other than yellow wasn't good, so I called DELL Support.
I reasoned that the controller surely couldn't be inoperative because how could I possibly even use the machine?!?! Nevertheless, I was convinced to go through steps with him. Once finished and rebooted I had a snappy system as expected and was happy (but I kept my eye on that SCSI Controller entry).

Now this doesn't sound like the specific problem here, but something surely is amiss in the machine in question.

By the way, I have an XP-Home machine with the page file size set at 1536MB. When I've freshly rebooted and display the Task Manager's "Performance" tab the system cache hangs in around 99000K. Then, when I start an app on another machine that accesses VFP tables on the XP machine, the "System cache" rises to as high as 409000K. So I'd also say that something seems amiss in the subject machine's usage of cache too.

cheers