painfully low fps

............

i guess do a system scan for viruses?

.

Sometimes its the little things..

Make sure you don't hae a bunch of items in a 'deleted' folder..e-mail can kill a marginal system.

Run a program to find registry issues. There are prolly hundreds of pointers to nowhere.

Defrag..yeah, Vista does that...but...

Good luck

If it isn't a virus problem or a temporary isp problem

Check dxdiag.exe to make sure there are no problems there.

What's running on startup ? Windows defender or MSconfig will show you what's running all the time as well as the services that are running.
Windows has by default loads of them many are not needed by the average user.

Have you considered creating a new user profile just for gaming with all but the essentials turned off.
Who needs bells and whistles when the object is to maximise game performance.

How much RAM do you have?

what's your video card too???