Constant stuttering while in windowed mode

Hopefully someone can help me with this issue.

While im playing ffxi in windowed mode i get this constant stuttering however while in full screen mode, everything plays smoothly.

I know its not a graphics problem because it runs at a constant 29 FPS. Plus I have no issues running much higher GPU intensive games like Starcraft 2 borderlands etc

Thanks for the help in advance

EDIT: I should also note that im running in SLI (nvidia) however when i changed all play online games to run on a single gpu, it seemed to reduce the stuttering a little but it was still there.

But like I said before, if im in fullscreen, it works fine, if im in windowed mode, it stutters.

I guess no one has a solution for this?

Got anything running in the background? I know on my end, XI likes to drop 10fps if I have certain web pages open in the backlog.

The main problem I have with the windowed mode is how XI still checks for keyboard input when it's inactive. Makes doing certain actions in applications unrelated to XI cause the entire OS to just slow down, until it catches up. The windowed mode in general is pretty garbage.

Nvidia sli or ATI crossfire (i think thats what its called) is not supported in FFXI and I've heard of some wild issues coming up when it's active.

Other then that, FFXI is special in the way that it runs. Unfortunately, comparing this game running to any modern game on the same rig just doesn't apply. FFXI was never really supposed to run in windowed mode to begin with. They gave in and added it in a patch some time after release. From quite a bit of the feedback that I've seen it was just thrown together at that.

The best answer I can give is to make sure your drivers are updated to a least the 314 version ( I think that one had a note about ffxi on newer cards as well). I'm running the newer 320 ones and don't have any issues atm.

I've never used sli, but I hear disabling it completely while running ffxi helps.
There is a check box in ffxi config as well called Graphics Stabilization that is supposed to fix certain issues as well.

Sorry its not the best answer, but hopefully it helps at least a little.