POL Viewer Suddenly Unbearably Laggy

[Kazra]

Ladies and gents, i've made my return to Vana'Diel and couldn't be happier about it.

I was able to play without any issues whatsoever for roughly 6 hours last night.

Started a new character on Asura, met some people, got the groove back, etc.
Now, today when I attempt to boot up the POL Viewer to log in, everything is fine and dandy until I enter my SQEX ID's password. I press next and... POL Viewer becomes so unbearably laggy the mouse doesn't even display when moved over it. Here's what i've done so far to remedy this:


I do have an NVIDIA card, so I changed my Optimus settings to only run the POL Viewer and FFXI both on the High-Performance GPU. I also updated my video driver to the newest Verde release.

I installed via Steam, and I am not using Windower. I read a few posts relating the steam install to the issue, so I downloaded the Windows compatible POL installer from the website, and reinstalled, same issue.

I copied all DX9 files suggested all over the place and installed extra DX packages even though I have 11 installed.

Worth mentioning, when I was playing yesterday, I did not have Abyssea activated on my account. I performed the upgrade for it, and shortly thereafter went to sleep. I did not attempt to close/open the viewer after the upgrade.

If I let it run, it DOES log me into POL, but hangs indefinitely (going on 4+ hours of waiting now) on Retrieving Messages.

Lastly, I attempted setting the pol.exe Process to Real-Time, and changed the Affinity between cores (tried single core, 2, 3, etc.). I have an i5

I've put a copy of my DXDIAG up on Pastebin here (http://pastebin.com/S6AniX1u).

Anyone willing to help, I really, really appreciate it.

TL;DR: Played for a few hours fine, now POL is slow as molasses. Updated, next step is reformat/reinstall! Help!

[Kazra]

Also might be worth nothing, everything else, including other games, run without flaw.

[RAIST]

Only time I notice POL bogging is when it looses focus, like if I have my sound control app up to adjust EQ or something, POL runs like a slideshow in the background. Just wondering if something isn't causing a similar effect. Something like Aero Theme, UAC settings, etc. may be causing an issue. Have you tried disabling them?

[Kazra]

Thanks for the reply! I'll clarify in my first post, pol was the only thing i had running, did not switch or tab off of it. I do not run UAC or Aero so I know they aren't affecting it. Also have it set to run as admin. Thanks for your help.

[Kazra]

Also like I mentioned, it ran flawlessly last night without any tweaking at all, and there were no changes to hardware and/or software since.

[RAIST]

For starters... might want to try to undo everything you changed, as best as you can, so you can try to pinpoint what actually may have changed between the last known good session and when it went haywire. Your system is considerably different now then it was when it was last behaving.

For instance, the problem you experienced was at one time documented as a driver issue that (last I recall) was being fixed in a beta about a year or so ago. It's fairly common for both ATI and nVidia to have bugs return in later releases--so the latest and greatest driver sometimes injects more problems. Compound that with the fact that FFXI is notorious for not liking the latest and greatest. Need to go back to at least the previous driver or the one documented on their forums as containing the fix for this issue--make sure to completely clean your drivers and install fresh to avoid mismatched versioning issues.

Various things we've seen cause issues in the past have included various things installed in the system, ranging from security software (particularly Antivirus, some try to stream updates in the background and cause issues) to HID and other USB devices, even the sound card drivers/subsystem (often times the WDM extensions for HDMI support and such).