It is windows and it's not DAW related. Just general PC stuff on the internet.

Have you done all the usual crap like clean up your system, defrag etc? What about inside the machine - has it been cleaned out recently?

All these little things can really slow a system down when thry apply cumulatively.

Yeah, I've done all that, cheers. It's seems attached to services.exe, which has a longish list of stuff in it and some things you can't even stop. You would need to uninstall, which is a no-no until I know what I'm doing, which could take a while in itself. It would be great to see what each part in services.exe was doing and zap the culprit but none of the available software breaks it down that precisely.

Not sure about the video slower than the audio bit. That's a new development.

Black Viper's website could maybe help out ?

Cheers,
Jerry

Another tool that can be helpful:  Process Monitor (aka filemon, regmon, etc.)  available at sysinternals.com.  Tells you what's happening on your PC.  Takes a little time to use though.

Thanks for the links and tools, chaps.