[Beasty]

well your right that silver light shouldn't effect framerate drop. There was a problem awhile back with streaming on netflix while silver light was open because silverlight effected the framerate because it didn't know how to handle the buffer rate for the streams. But halo isn't a web browser, so it shouldn't effect it....

The warping is not related im pretty sure. Network issues would cause warping, but performance drop is client side and shouldn't effect how others see you. And windows closes all running programs fully before beginning a system restart, so i also highly doubt that that is the problem either.

So, i need a bit more info. Are there any other things messed up besides the frame rate? Are there any error reports or logs or something? What errors did you get when you try to do a sys restore?

Did you attempt to play halo immediately after the restart or did you start it after the computer had been sitting for awhile? The ladder can cause programs to run slow for a little while if the computer executed system idle process because there was no other thread to run. So when halo is started, it demands CPU usage and immediately stops system idle process from running and adjusts how much CPU percentage will be used by halo (system idle process may have ended already if you have say perhaps programs that run on the desktop). if system idle process is used for awhile before quickly transferring CPU usage to another program, the computer can be slow at first with transferring the usage between programs. Its like waking up from sleep. Once your awake, your awake, but it takes time to start doing things at a normal pace.