Mamewah as shell, computer bogging down?

[Popcorrin]

I have my computer set up to boot directly into mamewah and I noticed occasionally that it runs extremely slow after it boots up.  The sound skips and old games like galaga run less than full speed.  The computer is a new emachines running windows xp.  

I pulled up the task manager and checked the processes to see what was eating up the cpu time and it turned out to be a system process named System that was eating up 99% of the cpu but only 220k of memory.  I checked another one of my computers and it seems as if this process was loaded on it also, it was using 220k of memory but no cpu time.  I have no idea what this program does or what could be causing the problem.  
Occasionally when I start up the computer the usb mouse doesn't work, I don't know if this would have anything to do with this?

Anyone know what could be creating this problem?

[cdbrown]

do you give it sufficient time to finish loading all the XP system tools (which you won't see with mamewah as your shell).  Perhaps something is being loaded when you start a game so that there is heavy access of the hard drive.  Have you spent time to tweak what services are set to automatically load on startup, what load on demand and what are disabled.   Unneccesary services can bog down an system.

As for the System process - I'm sure it's important but mine is always 0% and 216k

[SpamMe]

I had a (likely) unrelated problem due to incorrectly hooked up USB headers. The System process used about 95 to 99% of the CPU all the time.

Process explorer showed that it was a usb driver problem using most of the time. Take a look, see what the system process is actually up to.

[Popcorrin]

Thanks for the responses.  Sounds like there is a good chance it has something to do with the usb mouse hack I am using.  If it happens again I will try to diagnose it with Process Explorer.