high & steady cpu utilization

newview is suddenly spiking my cpu to 98% and keeping it there for several minutes at a time. it causes the client to report packet loss and windows to report that the program is not responding.

network utilization is very low and i'm not necessarily in a new area. it'll happen when textures and sounds are already downloaded.

i have a P4 - 1.7MHz with 512MB of RAM and a GeForce 4 Ti 4200 with 128MB. any and all suggestions are welcome.

Could be blocking disk I/O when reading from the cache. Check your chipset drivers. Also check your event log (XP) for disk read errors.

thanks ezhar. i hadn't thought of disk access being the bottleneck that choked my "connection."