YES I KNOW I HAVE A LOT OF COMPUTER PROBLEMS!

So I posted this same topic on the Java forums because I felt I was nagging this community too much, but nobody there responded ​.

I am running Windows XP SP 3

SO! For SOME RANDOM REASON a few days ago java just started running SLOW! I was developing an applet and when I ran it stuff being drawn on screen moved EXTRA slow. I know this is a problem with specifically my computer because on my laptop (which is running Vista SP1) the same applet runs perfectly smoothly. This only happens with certain applets, but there's no difference in their coding whatsoever.

This just happened out of nowhere, one day I turned off my pc and the applet was randomly slow.

I have tried reinstalling the JRE and JDK. I have also made sure I have the most recent updates of java and I have ALSO tried installing earlier versions of java.
I have even reinstalled Windows XP on a BRAND NEW partition with no luck.

I have no idea what's going on.

I know it's a long shot, but but anyone have any ideas what's going on?

Alright, I think I've narrowed this down to a video driver problem.

I reinstalled XP and ran the applet and it was super slow (no drivers installed). I then installed my video card drivers and Catalyst Control Center and ran it again and it was A LOT faster,  but not as fast as my laptop.

I now remember, because of the video card troubles I was having (another topic), I reinstalled my video card drivers right about the time this problem started.

Another interesting thing is that in Virtual PC and other programs such as VMWare, these applets run fine.

So I think this is a video card driver problem. I reinstalled the drivers and updated to the most recent ones but I can't seem to get it to run any faster. When I updated my video card drives to the most recent ones, it made it run EXTREMELY slow again.

I have an ATI Radeon HD 4800 video card.

You've got to be kidding me!

Alright, so I've been installing and reinstalling all different versions of Windows ALL DAY. I tried Windows XP SP 2, XP SP 3, XP Pro SP2, XP Pro SP2 64 bit, and Vista SP 1.  I was even willing to go to Windows 2000, which I was about to try until this.

So a few minutes ago I figured I might want to check my hardware. Since I thought this was a video card driver issue, I figured I would try a different video card. Now, I THOUGHT I didn't have an extra video card, or else this would have been the first thing I tried. However, I was going through some boxes hoping to find my Windows 2000 disk and I found my old Nvidia GeForce 4 MX video card. So I popped that into my computer and tried running java and things were even slower than before (I don't know how that's even possible, but alright). So I unplugged that and tried to restart and I got the whole monitor no signal problem again. I tried a ton of things to fix this, but what I ended up doing was unplugging my video card from the PCIE slot and plugging it back in. I never tried this before because I thought it was suck in the slot. However, I was forgetting to unclip the second clip that my case has to hold my PCIE cards in place, which was the vent for the video card's fan. So I unplugged the card from the PCIE slot and plugged it back in and booted up to make sure everything was alright with the video card, booted up Firefox and it opened to the last page I was on (the java applet) and now it just FLIES.

Everything went back to normal; I have no idea why!

I've spend the last 3 - 4 days trying to fix this, and all I had to do was remove my video card and plug it back in?

That's lame.