My laptop has 34 processes running just looking at the desktop. It still plays fine.

Did you try to defrag the hardrive? What you are describing sounds to be either a fragmented hardrive or your pc IS using the swap file, which you do not want during a game.

Start FS 2K2 then do a cntl - alt - del and check out the taskmanager. See how much RAM you have free.

Looking at my processes, between real player, aol instant messenger and office xp I could free up about 75 MB RAM which could be your problem.

Do you have any anti-virus programs running, they all stink and cause many problems with gaming. I would turn automatic updates off, that might be accessing the internet every once in a while, also could cause the stutter.

I reformat all my drives every 6 months or so. This may sound like overkill but I have backups of everything and it takes me no time at all to reinstall everything.

Is your hardrive almost full? If not, then you have to see what programs you have installed that would try to look for updates.

This is one of those things that I wish I could be there, sort of hard to diagnose like this you know?