Annoying lag while typing in Vista

Hi,
Recently I've been experiencing a really annoying lag while typing. Characters appear a couple of seconds after the keystrokes. This has becoming really annoying of late. As a matter of fact I'm experiencing a lag while typing in this message . I have a Dell XPS with 4 GB RAM, Vista OS.Also there's a minimal CPU usage. Can someone please help me out in resolving this.

 

Did you do anything immediately before this occurred?

Maybe try starting up in safe mode and see if it also occurs - if it doesn't then something is running and causing this.

Somehow my first thought was malware - but then why would it be so obvious...

 

How long has this been going on? Have you made sure that all of your drivers are up-to-date?

 

Haven't installed anything new other than updating my iTunes version.
I've scanned for malware too.None found. Right now I'm ending few processes from the task manager in a trial and error procedure. Let me see how it goes. Thanks.

 

I wouldn't randomly chuck out processes - just booting in safe mode would be easier.

Maybe also try hijack this is it works correctly in Safe Mode.

 

I've closed a few unnecessary apps from the task manager and the lag seems to have gone . Too bad I don't remember which ones I closed except for the Windows sidebar. None of them were system apps though.

 

Then it's likely that the driver for one or more of those apps was causing the problem. Also, it generally not going to be a system process that's causing the problem - those are usually fairly well-behaved - but some add-on, generally a third-party add-on, that has a poorly written or buggy driver or deferred procedure call mechanism and is hogging too much time at elevated execution priority - a notorious culprit in many cases is a network card driver that blocks waiting for a response from its hardware while it's in high priority mode, which effectively prevents anything else from getting cpu time until that driver unblocks.

It would be useful if you could go back and figure out what you cut off. Try checking in the event logs to see if the manual kill on those processes was logged there.