In reply to:

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I'm not talking about the "known problem" of the app appearing at the top of the task list and seeming to consume a lot of CPU. There's nothing I can do about that.

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It's not 'appearing' to use cpu. It's actually using it. Although the 'system idle process' uses all free cpu, it at least doesn't cause laptop fans to start spinning and also when you look at the performance graph in taskmanager, the cpu is nailed at 100%.

A friend of mine had a similiar problem with one of his VB programs. It seems that VB doesn't really like looping around calls to releasing the cpu. As all that does, is use the cpu. I think but can't check until next week, that he had to use small sleeps instead.

As for the original problem, I'm not suffering from that, but then again running empegface takes cpus cycles away from looking for little green men so I've stopped running it.