What causes choppy minimize and maximize animations?

Question

I know this seems like a mundane detail, but on a computer with an Athlon Dual Core processor and 1 gigabyte of ram, why would playing a game (like The Sims 2) cause the minimize and maximize animations of all windows to be choppy and slow after closing the game down? I tried adjusting the refresh rate and updating my graphics card drivers, but to no avail... It is interesting though, that the issue is temporarily resolved if I change the screen's color quality to 16 bit and back again to 32 bit, but the same thing just happens again when the game is launched the next time. How can I remedy this?

I am running an ATI Radeon 9200 PCI, but the system does have Nvidia GeForce 1650 LE integrated.

Answer 1

What kind of Video Card are you running. Or, are you running onboard graphics?

Answer 2

If you want to get rid of this animation altogether, go to your control panel and click on performance and maintenance. Then click on system and go over to the 'advanced' tab. Click on the settings button under performance. The first checkbox you see should say something like "Animate Windows When..." - uncheck it and you should be fine. If you still want the animation but don't want it to be choppy, I don't know what to tell you. I have a GeForce 7800GT and I have that problem sometimes, also.

Answer 3

Have you run a diagnostic on DirectX? It might give some clues.
Run a diagnostic from START/RUN
type in

dxdiag

Other than that, I'd bring up the window to see what processes are running. You may have some background TSR that is hogging up resources. (ctrl-alt-del - check for Mem Usage) - There might have been a dumped process running in the background.