I don't usually like getting paranoid, but this is starting to look like I might have some malware going on. I just installed a 3070Ti, and for the most part VR (Reverb G2) is amazingly smooth even at fairly good-sized airports. But every once in awhile, the sim will keep running smoothly but when I turn my head there's severe display lag, where I'll get big black bars to whichever side I'm turning my head for a second or so until the display catches up with my head movement. The weird bit is that if I open the task manager, that lag instantly goes away and everything's smooth again.  If the task manager gets minimized, the lag will sometimes come back.  That's almost behaving like there's something running on my machine that doesn't want me to know it's running, so it terminates itself when the task manager is activated.

Am I being wildly paranoid here? Any tips for making this go away without having to hit ctl-alt-esc all the time?

 

Well for starters if you think it's malware then do a virus and malware scan, plenty of free apps on the internet will help you with that (I use spy bot).

Turn off any background programs whilst you're running MSFS, make sure Windows update isn't kicking in as well, update drivers etc. 🙂

Yep, I've done all that. Nothing detected, everything's up to date, and I kill anything that isn't sim-related before I start the sim. I just can't figure out why pulling up the task manager improves VR tracking performance significantly every time. It doesn't make sense unless something's closing itself when it sees the monitor pop up, but I can't find anything that would be the culprit.

 

Maybe try a reinstall of your VR software/drivers.

Watching.  Happens to me a lot. I have not found the source.  However, the other day, flying with friends, I lost multiplayer server connection. All tags out in the distance went away.  The freezing went away. No amount of head movement caused it anymore. I plan to test this next time it starts happening by turning off multiplayer or switching servers. 
 

Maybe I have an addon plane with bad LOD models or something. 
 

Still trying to find out what’s up, and will watch this thread. 

Scratch that.  Had headset lags today and turned off multiplayer and they were still there.  I still think it's related to loading something from the internet, but when it happens, CPU load goes very high on all cores.  So, it's doing something, just not MSFS code.