Wednesday night during my League race I fired up NR2003 and went to Bristol. My FPS SUCKED. I had been running NR2003 with just about everything maxed with 4AA / 4AF on, etc and having very solid FPS with a minimum of 40fps since I rebuilt my new system. Well I was in like the 20s at Bristol and I was told Bristol was heavy on the system so I chalked it up to that. But I was turning just about everything off and not getting much results but did get it up to about 40fps.

I didn't think about it at the time, but when I entered the game my Wheel was not recognized. So I reboot and same problem. So I exit, unplug the wheel form the USB2 hub and put it back in and it recognizes no problem. I test in control pad / game controller setup and no problems. Fire it up and the wheel is now fine. I figured because I added one of these:



that the USB2 devices just needed to be added. (It's a 6 in 1 media reader) Didn't think anymore of it. Well last night I go to Planetside and my FPs were 17!! I usually get a wide range of between low 40s - 120s depending on the number of vehicles and people on the map. I then try BF1942 and Desert Combat and its a virtual slide show. Couldn't figure out what was going on. So I just unplug my 4 port USB2 hub and VOILA! Problem solved.

So - it's obviously the issue. My question is this, whats the WinXP 'etiquette' for these devices? I must have a conflict somewhere. The weird thing is, it was the hub and not the 6 in 1 reader - which does created like 4 new drives on my system when you go into control panel. So is there a limit to the number of devices? The only 2 things on my USB hub at that time were my Clie base station (which wasn't active) and my Logitech Force Wheel which was not being used - but was recognized of course.

The easy solution is to just unplug what I'm not using when Im gaming - but that will be and is a pain in the arse.

Any ideas and/or solutions out there?

System specs are on my sig file.