Sudden FPS drop and High CPU load

I've been playing FFXIV for about a week now, and every so often I have problems. Occasionally my frame rate will drop from about 30 down to 3-5. This seems to happen mostly when I'm crafting, but can happen at any time. Leaving the game and coming back fixes the problem, but then after a while (sometimes an hour, sometimes 5 minutes) it will come back. When I check my system monitor, my GPU isn't overtaxed, and my ram is only about half used. My CPU, on the other hand, is running at 99% on all cores. As soon as I leave the game, my cpu drops back down to 15%.

I was playing it with high laptop settings, and tried dropping them. It made an incremental difference in the framerate while the game was running well (It went from 33 to 37 fps).

Here's the hardware setup.

Display: Dell 17.3 inch HD LCD laptop display
Processor: Intel core i7-2670QM
Ram: 8GB 1337 Mhz DDR3
GPU: Discreet Nvidia Geforce GT 525M with 2GB of dedicated VRAM
OS: Windows 7 home premium 64 bit.

My friend is running it on his desktop at higher settings with a worse video card, and 6+ year old processor with no problems.

You said your CPU is running on 99% on all cores, can you show us your CPU temperature? Odds are that your CPU fan has not been mounted properly. However, if you are playing other games intensively, and working just fine, then my guess is that you probably got some malware or virus in your system that is turned on when running programmes. Do a system clean up, defrag, restart and see if the problem happens again.

But do check your CPU temperature!

^^^ couldent had said it better mine run at 20% i7 core