My old desktop is a 2.5 Celeron with 1.5 GB memory. I can load several RealTracks without the problem you described. With 2 RT and RD, I only use at most 50% CPU and have no audio dropouts. But I do have 7200 drives.

- Have you ruled out viruses and spyware?

- You pagefile may be fragmented. It sound like you have a fixed size pagefile and do not let Windows manage it. That's a good thing. This program from Microsoft will tell you if your pagefile is fragmented and make it contiguous: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897426.aspx

- When you monitor the CPU, check on the memory usage of BIAB and the overall pagefile usage. I suspect paging is probably what is happening. Depending on memory usage, you MAY be able to get away with disabling paging thus freeing up the CPU time of that task.

R