FFXI running at 1 fps

Weird issue, I logged out this afternoon to restart my laptop and install the drivers for a modem I'd just bought. Installed the drivers, then load up PoL, fine until it gets to the FFXI "Play" screen. After that, it lags tremendously. Hit "Play" anyway, and find FF will run, but I'm only getting a few frames per second, and it's short bursts of graphics.

So, I uninstalled the new drivers and re-installed them since this was the only change to have taken place and no effect. Then I uninstalled both PlayOnline and FFXI and re-installed them, ran a file check on both and the issue is still there. I've also tried FFXIV and that runs fine. Anyone got any ideas?

Idea: Uninstall FFXIV, it's leeching the awesome from FFXI.

I'm going to guess your on a laptop that has switchable grafics. Even if you set your BIOS settings to use the nvidia card only the game fails to see this and tries to run the game on your intel FFXI chip. This happens with my m11x when i use some drivers, like 285.62. The best drivers iv found, that work for XI and XIV for nvidia are

301.24 (using this now)
266.58
295.73
296.10

Would help if you posted the details about your play environment--hardware specs, OS, etc. Depending on your rig, someone may already have a fix available for you....but need to know what you are running.

If it's the new 600 series nVidia's, SE already announced in an earlier thread that that line is currently not officially supported (only tested up to the 500 series, and only with a specific driver release). Just like early on with the 400 series cards, they are having issues with the 600 series. It's been reported on the nVidia forums, and they have been looking into it...but claim to be having trouble reproducing the errors. If you have an nVidia chipset, may want to go to the section for your card:
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showforum=196