Camera freezing when controlled w/ mouse

[Eekiki]

Yeah. That's my next step. It feels like the game is trying to load something, and having a tough time of it. I thought a full defrag of the hard drive may help it along, but that didn't work either. I'll give reinstalling a shot.

[Halchart]

Remember to delete the FFXIV folder in your "My Documents" folder because just uninstalling wont get rid of it and you'll have the same issue if you don't.

[Sajittarius]

TLDR: plug in a gamepad if you have one and havent been using it.

Story:

I went through everything i could find online to try to fix my stuttering. I have a decent rig, fps was 50ish steady. It just stutters every 6 seconds or so when you rotate the camera with the mouse or noticeably while gathering (which screws you up when bad chopping at trees).

I have an SSD so i knew that wasnt the fix (but it might help people who dont have one, helps a ton with loading the stuff you see onscreen)

I tried vsync on, off, triple buffering on/off, vsync 1/2 refresh (new nvidia drivers have the option..), fps cap 60/30 through game and other numbers through nvidia inspector app. Change the frames rendered ahead between 0-3. Tried a few different nvidia drivers ranging from 285.xx-301.10. Nothing worked.

I dont run an antivirus, so it wasnt an AV slowing me down. Im a network administrator and i havent gotten a virus in several years, although i do still scan my pc regularly just to be safe.

I disabled headphone detection. I have an Auzen XFI (sound blaster based card). For me that meant renaming CTXFISPI.exe so it wouldnt load at startup. No change.

I changed my mouse polling from 500 to 333Mhz (using a logitech gaming mouse though maybe it was too fast for ffxiv). No change.

I disabled my homegroup in win7. This helped marginally. At this point i was running ffxiv windowed with my task manager on the side watching page fault deltas. Not to get to technical but this shows you if another programming is slowing down the game by jumping in and using your cpu (which then makes the game stutter). I started checking windows logs and it pointed at the firewall/homegroup. I had already disabled the firewall so i disabled my homegroup in the Network and Sharing Center and in windows Services i set HomeGroup Listener to Disabled. The page fault number changed from 5000 to 3000 but the stutter was still there. It seemed a tiny bit better so i knew i was on the right track.

Then the error in the log changed to a plug and play thing. I googled it online and someone somewhere said that event pops up when the computer is looking for a device. Hmmm... what would the pc be looking for when ffxiv starts up? Lemme plug this here xbox controller into the computer. Started up FFXIV... Viola! NO STUTTER. In fact the game runs so smoothly now, i might even turn AO on....

Apparently the SE programmers in their infinite wisdom have FFXIV poll the computer every few seconds for a gamepad... EVEN IF YOU DISABLE GAMEPADS IN THE FFXIV CONFIG.

This is probably to make it easy to use one if the game is already running and for some reason you had forgotten to plug it in beforehand or if the gamepad gets disconnected/reconnected. I dont know if theres a fix that doesnt involve plugging in a controller. Sorry.

My PC:
CPU: i7 920 2.67Ghz
Video: Nvidia GTX570
Mem: 6GB Ram
HDD: Corsair SSD