Woke up to slow, sluggish htpc :-( Help! !

[wantonsoup]

Windows 7 mce. Hardly any plugins. Ceton USB tuner. Works great! Until this morning, when I hit play and the video was choppy (audio is fine). The problem continues in the mce menus... even after reboots, system restore to a few days ago, the problem continues. Any ideas? ! it's making watching a show impossible. the pc is fine when I close mce.

 

[wantonsoup]

SOLVED.

It was the slow death of my old video card (7+ years old). I did a disk scan to rule out HDD failure, and then the PC stopped POSTing. Removed the video card and it runs like new (albeit on VGA only!). The fan had seized up, the card overheated (melting lots of stickers) and for $15 at MicroCenter I'm back in business.