I have returned to WOW after quitting last October. Whenever I play WOW, my frame rate drops to about 2 for about 1 minute and a half every 6 minutes or so. As far as I can remember, this never happened when I played in the past. In the periods between the framerate drops my game runs perfectly smooth. After this happens, I can open up my task manager and see large spikes in my CPU usage history. I am running the game with a NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT, AMD Athalon 64bit X2 Dual Core processor 6400+, 3.3 gigs of ram, and I'm using Windows XP. I checked my directx files and they are up to date. Thus far, I have tried messing around with the video display settings and disabling all of my addons, and exiting out of any background programs. I also followed some of the advice regarding NVIDIA cards that I found on another thread here. The problem persists through the attempts to fix it. Does anyone have any idea how I can fix this problem?

Hi Exorian,

You may want to take a look with Process Explorer and turn on the CPU Usage history column - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx
It will tell you which process(es) are causing your CPU usage to spike.