3d Game lag

[lothar]

I've been playing wow and other 3d games such as Starwars Jedi knight 2 for a long while. recently I've noticed when I try to login wow every thing lags (sound, and movement speed) the graphics are great, the only time I get the lag is when my toon moves or when I move the mouse. my status light on my tower makes a strait light then after 2 seconds it leaves then no lag. I get this every 3 seconds. on jedi knight, when I try playing on multi mode (create my own lan server) I keeps telling me I lost connection and lags like on wow. I've updated the drivers on my graphics crad, network card, direct x. I've shut down all the ap's that I'm not using in the background. I have norton 2006 and spy sweeper, I've tried shutting them down as well. It's never done this before, I've even went to the point the fomat the hard drive and reinstall windows x and operations.

I also play Ultima online, it never lags and runs great.

I have: intel pentium 4 3.20ghz and 1gb of ram
256 nvidia Gforce FX 5950 ultra (graphics crad)
I dont know who much memory I have my computer is fairly new. Plus until latly it's never done this before.
oh yeah and I ran a disk check and defrag computer still nothing
Please help!!

[SupaTroopa]

So it sounds like your hard drive is accessing something during this time (if your tower light is staying on while it lags).

You reformatted the entire HD and this still happens? What else have you added lately? (if anything)

Are you suuure there's no viruses or spyware on your PC?

It's hard to pin point when it's only those 2 games it's affecting, and apparently nothing else.

[lothar]

it does it with any game that uses the internet/network and is 3d, for awhile I've had no firewall or anitvirus. (thats when things got all messed up) well I reformated the hard drive and installed both spy sweeper and norton 2006, I found no viruses or spy, plus becuase I formatted the hard drive wont that mean all spy and viruses are gone?