menu lag, and non responding program

hello all. I am posting this message in desperation. Since day one with prepar3d (any version) when I select any menu item, the program will hang for 25 seconds and then the menu will open. If I task switch away from prepar3d I get the same thing, and see a program not responding message in the title bar of prepar3d. I simply put up with it. Last week I started using the prepar3d start menu system. to select a flight and aircraft etc, and... lo and behold no more lags or non responsive programs!

I could not imagine what caused it to work better. Unfortunately, now a week later things are back to the same old,same old. prepar3d lags 25 seconds when selecting any menu item and non-responsive when task switching.

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 now to make things even more maddening to debug.

2) FSX never has the menu lag, never goes un responsive.

3) XBMC( a video/pvr program) does the exact same thing as prepar3d. task switching out causes a 25 second non responsive program lag.  

However, (for a tottaly different reason), I re-installed xbmc a week ago, and... no lag! for one week, xbmc also did not lag or go non-responsive. The same week as prepar3d worked good.

running process watcher, I see that xbmc has 4 wait threads that say waiting on network I/O

prepar3d shows nothing, but it is non responsive with no wait threads.

I made no changes to my computer in the past week, that would have caused things to work temporarily. I did install a new cpu cooling fan/heatsink. I cant believe that made the programs go bad once again. Temp never has been an issue and xbmc only uses 1% of cpu power while running anyhow, temps, fan speeds and cpu speed even, is always low while running XBMC. So I cannot suspect any heating issues.

 I detect no other programs on my system lagging or going non-responsive.

 I do not have any external usb drives connected. I have read alot on this problem. I doubt it is a driver issue, if it suddenly fixed itself and then came back again. I also cannot believe it is a bad harddrive because why would it fix itself for one week, and then go bad once again?

FSX and XBMC is on one physical drive and prepar3d on a different drive. They all have some files on a seperate 3rd drive the boot drive, as everyone knows. (The windows drive)

I do not blame prepar3d, but... in desperation I was hoping maybe somebody else had seen a similar problem.

Oh by the way, I also shut off my virus progra (comodo) to no avail.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

-Stampee