Intermittant brief client lockups

[hotstud]

Does anyone else have this issue or know how to fix it?

Seemingly randomly I get like a 1/2 second to 1 second lock up where the game freezes. This has happened as long as I can remember but I just ignored it because it was infrequent (every few minutes) and very brief. However I started AE kiting on a Bard and this is making it impossible as I just die every time one of these freezes occurs.

I have used WinEQ2, turned every graphical setting possible to the lowest, set CPU affinity to a single processor, changed Windows to highest performance settings, tried timing the lockups to see if it occurred at a regular time interval, none of this has done anything.

I could have 100 mobs on my screen and lock up or I can just be running through an empty area and lock up. There doesn't seem to be any correlation to anything that I can see.

My only solution so far is to run EQ in Linux which eliminates this problem but I have the mouse wrapping problem where the cursor stops at the screen edge preventing you from turning your character all the way.

P.S. I'm also open to any ideas regarding changing EQ setttings. This doesn't occur in any other game and my PC is pretty beefy. Can I run EQ in a different DirectX version, or are there any other hidden client settings I can change that will fix this piece of shit?

Update: If I unplug a USB device or plug one in it recreates the exact split second freezing every time. Either unplugging or plugging it in. It seems to happen a couple seconds after so it's obviously when Windows is doing something regarding detection but what could cause this when I'm not changing any devices?

[Pyronost]

I dont know if you ever found a solution to this problem, but I seem to be having the exact same thing happening.