CPU Maxed playing Freecell, Spider, or Minesweeper

Hi all!

I'm having a very perplexing problem with my system. As I mantioned in the title, when I play Freecell, Spider or Minesweeper, I see the CPU usage go way up and the game becomes very slow in responding. I am running a CPU meeter and it sometimes goes all the way to 100% usage.

I find this hard to believe since I have a dual core Q6400, a GeForce 8800GTS, and 3GB RAM. Also I can play Oblivion with fairly high settings without any performance problems.

I'm at a bit of a loss on how to troubleshoot this one. Any suggestions?

Oh, forgot to mention that I have been having this problem for a while and it seems to be getting worse. I've been upgrading my video card drivers in an attempt to fix things, but to no avail.

Any help is appreciated! TIA!

Here's a shot of task manager and minesweeper open at the same time. This is right after opening minesweeper when it's doing the opening animation. (The CPU doesn't stay at high usage, it does go down if I'm not doing anything with the game, but when I begin to play it san spike up.)

I can give that a try.

It's really odd that other programs don't see the same problems. Only those games.

Although on a slower machine, a Toshiba R100. Before starting these games I see a warning saying that graphics acceleration is not enabled [the R100 doesn't have accelerated graphics] and to expect slow performance. That's fine, but maxing out CPU at 100% for minutes at a time is not just slow, it's ridiculous. The XP versions worked fine on machines that were less powerful than this one. A weird W7 bug.

Try turning off Folding @ Home.