I had the exact same problem on my computer. I had a modicum of help when I set the affinity to core 1, but it barely made a huge difference. It got the worst for me when more of the ground or wall textures in any particular zone were occupying my monitor. I had simply resigned myself to never being able to kite (Druid), when one day AVG started running a system scan while I was playing. My game immediately sped up to normal speeds in the exact same areas and camera angles that were causing me to be 'snared.'
I know it sounds insane but I swear it's true. To test it, I cancelled the scan and it immediately went back to the snare-run effect. I then manually started the scan-- voila, my run speed increased.
I thought AVG might be the root cause of the problem, so I went in and manually disabled component states one by one to no avail. None of them being disabled fixed anything. I then entirely uninstalled AVG (I was running 8.5 at the time and thought it might be my version since 9.0 came out), restarted, and the problem persisted-- snared running. Obviously AVG wasn't the cause (and therefore the solution) since it wasn't installed at this point.
I then downloaded/ installed AVG 9, started up EQ: snared running. I opened up the AVG shell applet, manually began a system scan with all options enabled at 'automatic' speed-- bam, my snared running immediately disappeared.
I'm running an intel dual-core laptop with Vista Home Premium, and I wonder if it may be an ACPI setting that's auto-tuning things in ways that don't affect desktops. My computer, although it is a laptop, is *more* than capable of running this game, and I use an extra laptop cooler to ensure it's got plenty of cooling.
Anyway, I just start an AVG scan whenever I'm in game now. The rest of my computer runs a little slowly, like if I want to alt+tab and look something up on the net, but it's more than functional.
My belief is that AVG uses up enough processor that windows relegates it to a separate core, so it has enough processor to do its job. In order to accomplish this, windows then switches some component services that EQ requires over to the same core as EQ, since they were likely running on a different core or a combination of the two (whence the speed up/ slow down effect).
In conclusion, here are my solution steps, if you want to try them:
1. Install AVG free 8.5 or higher (lower may work but these are my only confirmed instances)
2. Set EQ to the correct core affinity in the shortcut (without quotes)- "c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe /c start /affinity 1 c:\progra~1\sony\everquest\eqgame.exe patchme"
3. Open up the AVG shell program and manually begin a system scan at 'automatic' speed, with all options enabled
4. Run EQ from shortcut.
It might not work for you, but it's worth a shot if you've exhausted all other options. Please let us know the results if you (or anyone else) tries this!
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