Hi Sirmarki, Dawnfire,

My brother and I did some Googling and came across these 2 posts that seem likely be the issue for Windows 7 (not sure if more current versions of Windows are affected):

https://social.technet.microsoft.com...w7itprogeneral

https://superuser.com/questions/8051...the-first-time

They talk about Window's gameux.dll being problematic for some older games, but I'm not sure why the problem happened suddenly and recently for me.

I followed one of the suggestions, specifically editing the Registry key one, which fixed my issue. I'm able to launch/run the game with no choppiness, and my cpu usage is no longer at 100%. Let me warn though, that editing the Registry may be risky/dangerous if you're not too familiar with it. Just throwing this out there in case you want to try it, or it may be safer to wait for an official fix/suggestion from FFXI's developers.

The Registry key that I edited is:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT > Local Settings > Software > Microsoft > Windows > GameUX > ServiceLocation > Games

I doubled clicked on "Games" and made its Value data empty (in essence removing the "https://games.metaservices.microsoft.com/games/SGamesWebService.asmx" value that it had.