Well I updated my video driver; it didn't make a difference.
must have something to do with the way the WMP11 works. I am planning on buying a new video card before too long, I am pretty sure that it will fix this problem along with some poor game play I have been putting up with.

I finally got a new video card and the problem is gone. But it still confuses my as to why covering just a couple hundred pixels would make such a dramatic performance increase. Nothing like that is visible now, now increase on CPU usage or decrease in quality.

I would think it was a ram shortage. There was lots of stuff I couldn't run due to ram being small in my last laptop.
This new one with 512 has been no problem with multiple softwares running all at the same time. Especially with the graphics stuff.

Just thinking about going in to view the SOTW made my old one slow down.

When put the focus on another window, Windows supposedly gives it more ccomputing power. but that doesn't really explain what the problem is.

I just came up with the idea that maybe since WMP is a 'background' process when not having the focus, it gets more power. I've found background tasks to run faster than foreground ones, like extracting an archive with 7-Zip.

I have a P1 Machine. Since it doesn't support Win XP so I had to install WMP 9 as WMP 10 + doesn't install without WinXP. Well that has an separate dedicated Graphics Card(Well at the time I had bought that PC (1993) there was no onboard graphics cards present. You had to buy them along with your motherboard.) . But still it used to shutter & clutter while the Visualisation is on. But on my latest P4 Box I don't have a dedicated Graphics Card but still it runs gr8. I mean there no shutter bugs no cluttering and my processor is like having 1-5 % Usage!!! I use WMP 11!!!