Imagine my studio computer: 3 GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 gigs, Windows XP Pro, ESI EPS1010. Ableton Suite 8. Drivers up to standard. It's ONLY my studio computer - I have a Mac for work and play.
A few days ago I had to troubleshoot a Linux NAS machine. Since it had no monitor, I took it from my studio machine. That's it. Let me reiterate: I only pinched the monitor for a few days. I haven't touched the machine since.
Now I've reconnected the monitor Ableton has gone completely wonky on me. I load a set that performed fine before, the CPU goes up to around 60 and then there's slowing down, crackling, pops. All sets, from the large to the small exhibit this. There is NOTHING, ab-so-lu-te-ly nothing different on the machine. I couldn't even change anything, because I only have one monitor.
I have checked the drivers, upgraded the graphics driver since it was out of date, uninstalled QuickTime and iTunes (though not active, they were on there) and triple, quadruplechecked the settings.
I'm stumped! The only thing that is truly different is that I switched my router downstairs for a more powerful one (my studio only gets wifi), but even with the wireless connection disabled, Ableton still performs like crap!
What more can I do? I hadn't done a thing to the machine to begin with, it is 'lighter' now than before in fact, with Apple crap (a lot of resident shit too!) removed. Weird thing: in the Windows manager there's often 20-30 percent Idle processes! In short... help!
EDIT I: Curious thing number two: when Ableton is NOT in the foreground, things go better - but when I switch back to the program, it goes crapazoid again. Which is strange, since it had the same graphics driver until I thought updating it might fix it.
EDIT II: It is definitely something with the Ableton and graphics. When Ableton is not in front (or sufficiently obscured by other windows) the crackling goes away and plays as it should. When a text balloon from Windows overlayed the Ableton screen, it 'fluttered'. I have uninstalled, then reinstalled the original (older) drivers. Reset the BIOS, checked all connections... it still stutters the moment I switch to Ableton.
When I use my mouse's scrollwheel to quickly scroll up/down through the clips, the set nearly grinds to a halt and the cpu goes through the roof. I have reinstalled 8.2.1 to see if it fixed anything, but alas no. The screen works fine (ran some nVidia tests to check the graphics card) so I'm out of ideas. It is the most peculiar thing I have ever come across.
I'm out of ideas, any experts with pointers what I could try? I could trash the config file, but Ableton is fine, except for the graphics impact.
